When Tamara Strauss joined Premier Inn, her job title was marketing director. She asked to change it. Her reasoning, from our conversation on The Global Marketing Leader podcast, comes down to five words every CMO should hear.
“...I kind of challenged back and I was like, but it's not marketing, it's customer.”
She became customer director. That wasn't a cosmetic change. It changed what she was accountable for, which rooms she sat in, and which decisions she could shape.
Escaping the colouring-in department
Tamara put the risk plainly. Marketing, she said, “gets pigeonholed ... to being slightly the colouring in department.”
It's a frustration I hear often from the senior marketing leaders I coach. They're measured on campaigns, then wonder why they're not in the room when product, service and investment decisions get made. The title on the door shapes the conversations you're invited into.
Her point goes further than a title, though: “it's customers who walk in the door. It's not people who are responding to marketing, it's customers.” See your job that way and your remit changes with it.
What owning the experience looks like
Premier Inn asks every guest to score their sleep. Tamara's team noticed the scores falling after three years on a bed designed to last six. For a brand famous for sleep, that was a commercial problem, not a facilities issue.
Because product and proposition sat in her team, she could act on it. Over more than 18 months they tested three mattresses in the same hotel on the same night, moved supplier, and designed a 12-year spring unit with a zip-on topper. Then they rolled it out to 65,000 beds. Sleep scores went back up, and a retail business followed.
Her brief for that bed belongs on the wall of every marketing team:
“It's got to be better for our customers, better for our team members, better for the planet, and better for the CFO.”
The same discipline went into the rooms, where two minutes off a room's cleaning time would save millions of pounds in overheads. And the payoff showed up where it matters most: 75% of Premier Inn's customers were returning.
Why this is a leadership question, not a structural one
None of this happens because the org chart says so. It happens because a marketing leader earns the right to shape product, operations and capital decisions. Tamara was clear about what that takes:
“...if you don't get the buy-in at the senior level for something related to the brand, I think it's very hard to then roll it out...”
That means speaking the language of capex, balance sheets and cleaning times as fluently as the language of brand. It means building relationships with operations, finance and property teams long before you need them. And it means holding a clear line: “There's no point having a brand story going out with great advertising that doesn't relate to the delivery.”
I said it in the episode and I'll say it again here: “the single most powerful marketing we can do is just deliver outsized value to our customers.” All brilliant marketing is growth marketing, and growth starts with the customer. I've written before about what it means for a CMO to own the customer; Tamara's story is that idea in practice.
Three questions to ask yourself this week
Which single customer metric would warn you of a revenue problem before finance does?
Where are product and experience decisions made in your business, and do you have a voice in that room?
If your title changed to customer director tomorrow, what would you stop doing, and what would you start?
Where coaching comes in
Widening your remit from marketing to customer is a shift in identity as much as structure. It asks you to lead peers you don't manage, to make the commercial case in the CFO's language, and to let go of some of the work that made you successful. That's the shift I work on one-to-one with CMOs and marketing directors.
I take on a small number of these engagements myself, by application. If you want to explore it, apply to work with me, or read more about how an engagement works.
And listen to Tamara's full conversation. It's one of the clearest cases I've heard for why the best marketing leaders don't stop at the campaign.