Kohl's has promoted Chief Digital Officer Arianne Parisi to a newly created chief customer officer role, reporting to CEO Michael Bender and charged with improving the omnichannel customer experience across loyalty, personalization, marketing, and more. Chief Marketing Officer Christie Raymond departs in September. Bender's rationale: "Bringing marketing and digital together under one leader will help foster a greater focus on the full customer lifecycle and how Kohl's shows up across customer touchpoints."
The appointment extends a turnaround strategy built on omnichannel experience. In stores, Kohl's is elevating brands like Sonoma and Lauren Conrad with fully outfitted mannequins, better signage and wayfinding, and sizing charts, while improving displays for Nike and Levi's. It's simultaneously cutting overall assortment choices — fewer options for more clarity, and better assurance that what shoppers see online is actually in store. On the digital side, a modernized e-commerce experience is showing early results in faster page performance and improved behavior around product pages, carts, and checkout, with more flexible payment options planned before the holidays.
The scorecard reads "improving, not growing." Q2 2026 comparable sales fell 0.9% year over year, net sales likewise — both better than Q1. GlobalData Retail's Neil Saunders was blunt: "a better performance does not equate to a good performance." The investments point the right way, he argued, but haven't given consumers a compelling reason to choose Kohl's — that takes exclusive products, limited-time drops, in-store events, "anything that provides an edge."
The CCO role is Kohl's answer to a question recurring across retail: can organizations with marketing and digital/CX in separate silos design a coherent customer journey? When loyalty, personalization, and marketing each hold their own KPIs, the customer lifecycle breaks at departmental borders. Merging them under one leader attacks that break structurally — and the fact that the CMO title disappears in the process reflects a broader shift of marketing's center of gravity from campaigns to customer operations.
But Saunders' critique marks the limit of any org chart: structure can make an experience consistent; it can't make it worth visiting. As Athleta Borrows Gap's Comeback Playbook — Same Consultancy, Sharper Message shows, the decisive phase of a turnaround comes after operational cleanup: answering "why us?" And that answer comes from a customer's actual unmet need, not an assortment list — the reframe demonstrated in Daiso Didn't Sell Cheap Goods — It Sold Five Minutes Without a Decision is precisely what Kohl's next phase requires.
The new role unites loyalty, personalization, marketing, and digital under one leader — Arianne Parisi, previously chief digital officer — reporting directly to the CEO, with a mandate covering the full omnichannel customer experience.
CMO Christie Raymond departs in September, and marketing folds into the chief customer officer's organization rather than remaining a standalone C-suite function.
Partially. Q2 2026 comparable and net sales each fell 0.9% year over year — an improvement on Q1 but still a decline. Analysts credit the direction while noting Kohl's hasn't yet built a compelling reason for consumers to choose it.
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