Latest news with #ForbesEntrepreneurialCMO50
Forbes
01-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
2025 Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50
Forbes The marketing leaders who made the 2025 Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50 list were celebrated at an exclusive event at Forbes on Fifth, where they opened their playbooks and shared their hard-won lessons for success. They gathered alongside a select group of industry peers to reflect on how they balance sustainable brand growth with the need for rapid, real-time decision-making. The evening wrapped with a toast to the bold disruptors shaping their companies, their communities and the wider world. Explore their key takeaways below and watch the event in full.
Forbes
30-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
2025 Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50 Closing Toast
| Apr 30, 2025, 02:30PM EDT Forbes CMO Network Managing Director Seth Matlins toasts the honorees of the 2025 Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50.
Forbes
30-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
2025 Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50 Welcome Remarks
| Apr 30, 2025, 02:30PM EDT Forbes CMO Network Managing Director Seth Matlins welcomes you to the 2025 Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50.
Forbes
14-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The 2025 Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50 List: By The Numbers
A look inside the list When considering what can be divined from an aggregated look at the 50 marketing leaders from around the world and across categories and industries, recognized on this fourth annual Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50 list, the consideration is both quantitative (but with a sample size of only 50, not statistically relevant—just interesting) and qualitative. Here's some of what we found interesting. Some threads You can find the complete 2025 Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50 list here.
Forbes
14-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Ennismore's Growth is Being Driven by DisLoyalty, Disruption And Drops
Courtesy of Ennismore While many marketers are trying to perfect a formula, Martina Luger is busy breaking one. The Chief Brand and Culture Officer at Ennismore, the U.K.-based hospitality company behind a portfolio of 17 hotel brands, including The Hoxton, SLS, and Mondrian, operating in more than 35 countries, Luger's entrepreneurial approach to marketing is helping turn an assortment of lifestyle hotels into a global collective. Equal parts fearless and forward-looking, Luger is intent on doing things differently—ditching traditional brand segmentation, subverting the standard loyalty playbook, and building an internal culture that treats rules as suggestions. And since joining the company in 2016, she and her team have been steadily rewriting the rules of hospitality marketing, not through incremental optimizations but by reimagining the system itself; part of why Luger finds herself recognized on the 2025 Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50. Dis-loyalty as Disruption While most hotel loyalty programs are built to reward repetition, Luger's team has reversed that logic. 'Traditional loyalty models reward people for sticking to the familiar and returning to the same places—we wanted to flip that idea on its head,' says Luger. So, while marketing's historic holy grail has long been loyalty, with their 'Dis-loyalty' program, Ennismore has instead introduced a paid membership model incentivizing what Luger calls disloyalty and encouraging exploration, spontaneity, and brand discovery. More than a clever name—this represents a philosophical shift reflecting Luger's broader marketing approach: upend tired systems, borrow boldly from outside the category, and rebuild around the way people actually live and travel. 'Our audience is very much a leisure audience,' she explains. 'We wanted something that felt very relevant... inspired by what Netflix did to TV or Spotify did to music.' And just as those platforms removed friction from content consumption, Luger wanted to remove friction from the travel experience by delivering instant value without the complexity or delay typical of hotel loyalty programs. While traditional schemes rely on points, tiers, and blackout dates, Dis-loyalty members get 50% off new openings, 20% off first-time stays, and 10% off return visits—perks starting when someone signs up. 'Simplicity was our biggest thing,' says Luger. 'Make it easy for people to understand; make it something they can trust.' Luger has also borrowed a cue from consumer tech and streetwear to sustain engagement: the 'drop' model. Through limited-time offers and surprise activations—like giveaways for guests who arrive first at a secret location with bags packed—she's experimenting with and importing the hype and immediacy of other industries into hospitality. 'It's interesting to see what level of engagement our audience is at—what level we can push people,' she says. The success of Dis-loyalty isn't measured by signups alone. True to Ennismore's ethos of pushing limits, Luger is tracking whether the program is actually changing behavior: Are members trying new brands? Are they booking openings that might otherwise take months to build momentum? Are they using perks across restaurants and bars even when they're not staying overnight? Breaking the Brand Building Mold 'If I could kill anything, it would be brand standards,' Luger tells Forbes, 'because everything becomes the same.' So, rather than relying, as so many do, on thick brand bibles or centralized rulebooks, Ennismore operates on lean definitions: each brand boiled down to just two words. As examples, Delano is 'sophisticated and enchanting,' Mama Shelter is 'sassy and flamboyant' and The Hoxton is 'homey and layered.' 'You have to give people enough to understand what you are but not be too dogmatic,' she explains. 'It's going to go wrong sometimes but the 10% that goes wrong is worth the 90% that goes right.' Another of Luger's most unconventional moves has been reinventing how a portfolio of hospitality brands is organized and activated. Rather than the category's traditional price segmentation, with 'budget' on one end of the continuum and 'luxury' on the other, Luger and her team are driving guest acquisition and retention with a narrative-based approach that appeals to different psychographic mindsets and not different demographic need states. 'Don't think of us as transactional brands,' Luger explains. 'Think of us as brands that have meaning,' an approach evident in what Luger calls Ennismore's 'neighborhood' brands, including The Hoxton, Mama Shelter, and 25hours. Deliberately designed not just as destinations for travelers, this approach positions the company's hotels as vibrant local hubs that embed themselves into the daily rhythms of their communities. 'We're talking about connecting with local communities; we're talking about championing up-and-coming talent,' Luger explains. In practice, that might mean curating pop-up markets with local artists, working with grassroots music collectives, or turning lobbies into event spaces for neighborhood gatherings. It also means designing F&B concepts that feel more like beloved local cafés and bars than hotel amenities—places where the community would go even if they weren't staying the night. Other brands in the portfolio take a different but equally intentional path. Mondrian, for example, is positioned not as a neighborhood brand but as a cultural icon, collaborating with global tastemakers and leaning into a more design-forward, cosmopolitan identity. The goal isn't uniformity but contrast. 'We'll say, OK, these four are in the neighborhood segment. We need to make these four feel really different—even if they offer a similar type of experience.' Luger's quite different segmentation strategy isn't just a branding exercise—it's a tool that guides partnerships, market entry, and even which new brands join the portfolio. 'It helps us look at where we need new brands and where we have strength,' she says. It's also what enables Ennismore to scale without sacrificing individuality—building a portfolio of distinct but connected brands that aren't bound by convention but are united by intent. Building a Culture Without a Playbook For Luger, marketing with an entrepreneurial mindset is also evident in how her teams are built and how decisions are made. Among other things, this means hiring for mindset over résumé. 'We hire for attitude over experience,' she says. 'Everything we're doing is new—there is no playbook.' Rather than rely on established processes, she encourages her team to build as they go—experimenting, refining, and evolving in real time. Driving this type of change and disruption demands a flexible, fast-moving, and profoundly collaborative culture, not a traditionally hierarchical one. 'People feel empowered to have a voice,' she says. 'It is quite a flat culture in that respect.' Growth Without Compromise Luger credits the company's ability to 'scale-with-soul' to a conscious rejection of rigidity and category expectations. With 20 new hotels and 35+ restaurants planned for 2025, Luger is leading growth without losing sight of what makes the company different. 'We are true to what we say we are,' she says. 'It doesn't mean it's easy—it's terrifying at times. But it keeps you inspired.'
