The moment you stop investing in brand and lean entirely on performance, you start converting demand you’re no longer creating. That’s the reality check from Lottie Norman, VP of Brand Transformation and Strategy at The Travel Corporation, who joined SALT’s Reza Moaiandin on the latest episode of Flipping the Playbook. For CMOs navigating commoditised markets, it’s a distinction that could define the next decade of growth.

Flipping the Playbook is the podcast that gives you a front-row seat to how leading CMOs are tearing up outdated marketing rules and building strategies that genuinely move the needle. If you’re tired of being told “this is how it’s done”, the show challenges those assumptions head-on.

Brand versus performance: a false divide

Lottie is direct about why the brand-versus-performance split persists in most organisations: measurement. Performance is easy to quantify. Brand is not. But the consequence of always investing where it’s easiest to measure, she warns, is a kind of collective laziness that hollows out long-term growth.

“Performance is brilliant at converting demand. And brand, in its purest sense, is brilliant at creating demand. Without one or the other, you really hit a stalemate,” she said.

The implication for CMOs is clear. If your teams are built around one or the other, you’re not just leaving money on the table, you’re eroding the pipeline that feeds your performance campaigns in the first place.

Reputation is repetition

In a travel industry where, as Lottie puts it, everyone promises the same “authentic experiences” and shows the same glossy visuals, distinctiveness comes from consistency, not from one-off campaigns. Her mantra for the teams at Trafalgar is simple but demanding: own something, and keep doing it.

“A lot of brands really fall down in doing one really cool campaign and then walking away and going back to their performance marketing,” she said. “It needs to be consistent across all channels.”

She backs this up with real proof points. Contiki’s most successful recent work wasn’t a big-budget campaign, it was a creator network of genuine brand ambassadors spanning music, fashion and technology verticals, who travelled with the brand regularly and talked about it because they truly believed in the product. They even ran a neuroscience experiment, fitting ambassadors with brainwave-measuring headsets on Contiki trips, generating the claim that a Contiki trip is scientifically proven to make you happier. The lesson? When you know what you stand for, creative bravery follows.

From brand-led to consumer-led

Lottie’s current transformation at Trafalgar isn’t a rebrand, it’s a fundamental shift in how the business listens. The goal is to move from a brand-centric posture to a genuinely consumer-led one: using customer research and data to shape everything from how tours are built to how the brand shows up digitally, and how it expands into new markets like river cruising.

“A lot of people say they’re customer-centric and data-driven. Very few brands truly do that,” she said. “If it just lives in marketing and doesn’t live through all teams and the way we actually operate, then it just becomes disingenuous and falls over.”

For CMOs leading transformation in heritage organisations, that’s a critical distinction. Brand evolution at scale only works when it runs through the entire business, not just the marketing team.

Courage is the strategy

When asked for her single takeaway for marketers, Lottie didn’t point to a framework or a channel. She pointed to courage. Overthinking, she argues, is the enemy of progress.

“Just take a punt and go with it and not overthink. The brands that actually stand up and do stuff and think outside the box are often the ones that win,” she said.

It’s a message that extends to humour, too. Lottie is clear that brands have become too cautious – too afraid of saying the wrong thing. But making audiences feel something, even through a witty reactive social post, builds connection in ways that polished campaigns often can’t.

Listen to or watch the full episode of Flipping the Playbook on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to hear all of Lottie Norman’s and Reza Moaiandin’s discussion on building brands that convert and endure. Subscribe so you never miss an episode, and please like and share the podcast if you enjoyed it.