Premier Inn’s Yasmin Mukhida-Olushola on pushing advertising beyond the comfort zone

I went into university and studied French without a firm idea as to what I wanted to do for my career. In hindsight, studying French incorporated discipline around communicating and translating ideas, and I had to spend a year as part of my degree living abroad in Bordeaux, immersing myself in another culture and learning to understand people.

While studying at Bristol University, I’d been earning some money on the side through marketing focus groups. I found it really interesting that there were brands willing to pay for customers’ opinions and that the brands were really interested in what their customers were saying.

My first focus group was for Unilever about hair. I got to go up to London and sat in a group and our conversation was monitored. After the session, I cheekily asked the moderator if I could have some work experience. That led to experience at Flamingo – a research agency – and that gave me this foray into marketing and the marketing process.

After university, I applied for a few jobs. One of them was for a market research company, and I failed that interview. I came second. I was devastated. Luckily, part of that process was an interview and presentation in front of a number of different agencies. One of them was an advertising agency, called Feel Agency. They approached me and asked if I would be interested in working for them.

Working at Feel was a great experience. It was a boutique agency and their ethos was built around purpose-driven marketing. The team had all formally worked at big networked ad agencies. It was here that I cut my teeth and learned about quality thinking at a really small level. I was doing everything at that agency – from booking meeting rooms through to working on my first TV campaign.

My first campaign was for Linda McCartney vegetarian sausages, where I got to meet Mary McCartney and vegan and vegetarian food wasn’t really as well established as it is now. My experience at Feel gave me the view of end-to-end process for smaller brands on high-growth trajectories.

After that, as I loved design and brand positioning, I took a job at Rufus Leonard, (now acquired by Frog). They were a brand and digital agency, and I was responsible for the retail part of the Lloyds Bank rebrand, which was a fascinating project to help deliver because it was a big change – we had to roll out new branding for 1400 different branches overnight.

The project encouraged me to consider brands and brand experience more holistically. I worked on all the retail campaigns in the branches as well. While with Rufus, I also gained experience across portfolio brand management at Aviva and then a whole brand refresh for Premier Inn. I really enjoyed working on hotels: there’s something about the experience that hotels provide for their guests that really resonated with me.

Next I got a job at GLH (now known as Clermont Hotel Group), who are a London owner and operator of hotels. I worked across a number of different brands within the group there. It was my first client-side marketing role and it was really interesting and a great entry point into hospitality – learning about dynamic pricing and London’s also a very unique hotel market,

My first job there was as marketing operations manager. It was a hands-on role and involved visiting and consulting on marketing strategies for each of the hotels, looking for opportunities to attract both inbound and domestic customers across both Leisure, Business and tapping into the M&E market.

GLH was really ambitious for a relatively small group, and we worked on two new brand launches. One of them was launching the first Hard Rock Hotel in the UK, in London. This was another massively informative experience: how do you take a franchise brand to an iconic London property? I was appointed head of brand at GLH, which gave me a broader remit and more input in the holistic customer experience. Next, I got a call from Premier Inn. They told me there was a brand strategy role going at Whitbread, and I jumped at the chance to work for the UK’s largest hotel company.

Yasmin at the Transform Awards

I would describe my time at Whitbread as an adventurous journey – going from brand strategy manager through to heading up a multi-disciplined team. There have been many structural changes – both in our team but also for our brand as we have moved from offering a ‘one-size-fits all’ product to offering more choice and expansion into new markets such as Germany and the UAE. Since I started in 2017, we’ve gone from having c.600 hotels to 840, making up 12% of the UK market, and have consistently achieved YouGov’s Number 1 Value Hotel ranking, along with entering Kantar Brand Z’s ‘most valuable’ brand list for the first time in 2023. We’ve even launched our own retail shop selling our beds and bedding! We’ve also had to navigate through Covid – which as you can imagine had a huge impact on the hospitality industry – we’ve learnt so much along the way.

At Whitbread, I have a campaign team who manage above the line and organic social, then there’s a Brand team who look after for the brand experience in our hotels across Premier, Zip and Hub. There’s an in-house Creative team as well, which is brilliant because it gives us the ability to react really quickly and effectively – and our team really all act as brand guardians and know the brand inside-out.

Unlike many hotel chains, the Premier group of hotels is quite unique, because we own and operate all of our hotels. So as a brand leader for this hotel business, I feel very fortunate because we have total control over our customer experience. It also means that we can replicate customer experience from one hotel to the next – which gives us our superpower: consistency – which is ultimately your holy grail as a service brand. Premier Inn is so well known and loved, we even get fan mail. Nothing gives us more pleasure than hearing direct the experiences of our guests who have had a great time in our hotels – for all manner of reasons. Upholding this trust is a big responsibility and one we all take seriously.

I feel I have been really lucky at Whitbread. I’ve had some great sponsors along the way and have been put forward for lots of programs. I’m a graduate of an Ethnic Minority Future Leaders Program, nominated as WiHTL’s Role Model for Inclusion and I was also nominated as a top 10 Future Marketing Leader for Marketing Week in 2023.

Premier Inn at Kings Cross, London

Digging into some financial reporting: 2023 looked pretty good. Revenue is up 13%, profits up 36%. Three goals in your financial report include: extend your UK market-leading position, and also become the number one hotel brand in Germany. What’s 2025 looking like for you?

We’ve been on such a journey. The last three years have shown year-on-year growth, because of the way that domestic travel has boomed. Last year was our best ever year. We’ve had truly fantastic results. We’ve also been doing a lot of work building the brand for the last three years, which is paying off.

I think this year is going to be quite a different picture for us. The economy mid-scale market is seeing a shift this year, and when you’re a brand that has the greatest number of rooms, then that’s going to affect us but you expect cycles and hospitality is a long-term business so consistency is key.

I think what’s really interesting is just how different hotels are these days. Previously, Premier Inn would have seen Travelodge as its main competitor whereas now the consideration frame is much bigger – there’s Airbnb, booking.com, hotels.com, Vrbo to name but a few.

We’ve got a proliferated competitor set. Understandably, this means many of our competitors are investing in brand marketing so we’re really having to fight to maintain and increase our share. We’re not on online travel agents – so being front-of-mind and salient is hugely important.

We also know that we’re an infrequent purchase. The challenge for us this year is going to be around making sure that we stay relevant and to not drop out of the frame of consideration. Amongst increasing competition, especially as we operate in the ‘value’ space, this is even more pronounced.

Germany is a really interesting market. What Whitbread has learned is that you can’t replicate a business in a new market, and knowing what to fix and what to flex per market is key. Times have changed. In Germany, we are on booking.com because we need to use that distribution channel as an awareness driver, whilst we’re also investing in the brand. As would be expected in the early years we have significantly lower brand awareness in Germany, so we really need to work hard.

The 2024 Premier Inn Campaign: ‘Do Your Thing’

I really loved the recent ‘Do Your Thing’ campaign. It was just lovely. There was something very authentic and genuine about the insight that fueled the creative execution. I’d like to know: how did the whole thing come about?

We were the first hotel business out of the blocks after Covid to go on TV. At the time, it was a big risk having to go to the board in April 2021 and proposing a TV campaign when everything was far from certain for the hospitality industry – with Covid still very much a potential threat to our business. We had to sign up and commit to media spend without knowing whether we’d even be able to open our doors!

Thankfully, we’d actually had buy-in from the business to develop creative during the Covid period. It meant that we had brand new positioning: ‘rest easy’. This was all based around establishing what Premier stands for. In previous years, we’d had Sir Lenny Henry in the ads and the messaging there was all around focused solely around sleep.

But we concluded that as a brand, we stand for more than that. We’ve built up a lot of trust and reliability within our customer base and brand perception. Our insight was that we needed to communicate, especially in a post-Covid world, that Premier is a safe welcoming place to be and that reliability and consistency are our superpowers. So we came out of Covid with that campaign which ran for about 16 months.

Next we iterated on that idea, this time showing off the room a bit more, especially as we had a significant number of our Premier Plus upgrade rooms now on offer. It was all very video montage-based. That was also the right positioning for us at the time. But by year three, we realized in this competitive space, we needed to stand out more.

We knew from our research that we had built up trust. We’re a really well-known and loved brand. The challenge was to push ourselves a little bit more. From a creative perspective: how do we become more memorable. Crucially we also had the guest insight data, which formed the part of our brief for the campaign. This pointed us towards the concept that Premier Inn was known as a ‘functional stay’.

We learned from our customers that there were all these incremental trips that people make and when they make these trips, they need to stay in a hotel. The reason for making these trips was often based around people’s passions, which is obviously more emotive. We understood that our customers are willing to travel when they’ve got a passion. We dug into this and explored some of the weird and wonderful reasons why people come to Premier Inn and Comic Con emerged as one of those.

We’ve got 80,000 rooms on sale every day. It’s not only for work that people stay with us. Often the reason people need to stay with us is because they’re up to something a bit more exciting and interesting. And that is part of the everyday fabric of the UK – so that all formed part of the brief.

From the three scripts on the table, the one we went with was the wildcard. If you’ve not seen it, it celebrates fans of pop culture convention Comic Con, in various costumes, staying at a Premier Inn, set amongst a backdrop of a recognizable, comfortable Premier Inn. But trying to sell-in a Comic Con script to a board was quite a challenge. We did qualitative testing with both business and leisure customers on the scripts and the Comic Con script tested the best.

There were some internal concerns that this might put off our business audience, but we tested it and found that this connected with our business customers too. In the feedback we heard things like: “This makes me feel like I can be myself when I come to a Premier Inn, and actually I’m a person at the end of the day. Just because I’m wearing a suit doesn’t mean I can’t have a bit of fun.”

We filmed the ad and then put it through System1 pre-live testing as well to give us the confidence. We needed reassurance, as this ad had to last us across the seasons – so it needed to work hard. It tested really well, and now we’re already seeing its impact. Despite being a tough sell to the business, if I look back to the original brief, which was all around being memorable, it definitely hits those notes. It was also a great integrated agency response between Leo Burnett (creative) and UM (Media).

It connects with your emotions. It makes me think, if I stay at that one, I can go downstairs in my tracksuit and have breakfast. I’ll be comfortable as ‘me’ at a Premier Inn.

Absolutely, if you want to have a whole plate of beans for breakfast, you can. Everyone is welcome to be themselves. That’s how we wanted everyone to feel while watching it. Whether you’re staying for business or leisure, you can be who you want to be. I think that tone is really important right now, more than ever.

We also did some work with the Diversity Standards Collective as well which was so helpful when developing the script. It just gave us another lens to ensure we were representing different groups authentically. We believe that inclusion is a really important feeling that we should be trying to get right in our communications.

I picked up on that both in the casting and the choice of roles. What have you learned in your career to help you get the best out of your marketing teams?

I think it’s very easy to begin work on an initiative with a preconception of ‘we’ve done that before, we did it in a certain way and therefore we should just continue on.’ I believe that having an inclusive safe space where anyone can feel free to challenge is really important.

This right to challenge should exist from a chief commercial officer right the way through the business to a marketing executive. It should always be OK to question and we encourage a diversity of thought. It’s a non-negotiable. That’s how I live and how I lead my team: everyone feels like they can be part of a conversation and that they can contribute. An idea can come from anywhere. But when a decision is made, we commit to it. I put a lot of time into building relationships in the team and creating that all-important psychological safety and trust.

At Premier Inn, we’re so focused on the brand – and I’ve worked for the brand for seven years, I know there will be things we miss because we’re working day-in, day-out, staring through ‘Premier Inn Purple-tinted glasses.' Members of the team with fresh thinking and challenges are very welcome. This is where it’s important to also have a great insight team and cultural intelligence.

Hotel reception, Premier Inn, Cardiff

How do you ensure clarity around market orientation, particularly with getting insight on your customers and competitors.

We've got a brilliant insight team at Whitbread and we work with partners like Verve, who have provided deeper cultural insights. We have Brandwatch, which is our social listening tool, which really helps us to keep tabs on our customers. For example, when we put our video of our new Premier Inn room tour, I look at all the comments to get a feel of what people really think of our rooms because unfiltered conversation is really important. We then marry that up with our own guest insight and then interrogate the space between the perceptions and the reality. In summary, we make sure that we’re maximizing our insight.

I think there is also a skill in tying that together. And sometimes you can be guilty of having so much information and data that you just don’t know where to focus. As a marketer, our role is to try and tell a coherent, logical story that makes sense of all the gathered insights and data points.

Premier Inn, Manchester

As a brand marketer, how do you balance the long and the short?

I think, in a world where we’re in a tougher economic environment, that question is ever more pertinent. I really hope we’re in a position one day where this question isn’t asked, because it should just be a given that businesses understand that value of both the long (brand marketing) and the short (performance marketing).

It comes back to storytelling. I think you can go into conversations with senior members assuming that they understand the importance of brand health. It’s our job to reiterate this and keep banging the drum. Our responsibility as marketers is to ‘market our own marketing’.

At Whitbread, we’ve started using the language ‘short term indicators’ versus ‘long term brand health’. I am always thinking: ‘How can we make sure that we’re giving the board reassurance when they may not be able to see immediate results from our investment?’

We know brand metrics aren’t going to change significantly on a monthly basis, as the move is more gradual, but just because something doesn’t shift frequently doesn’t mean you don’t report on it frequently; in fact, it shows that we’re actually doing the right thing and constantly reminding everyone of the importance of brand health.

Our media agency always says: “You can't harvest if you haven’t planted the seeds.” I see it as our job to tie together the impact of brand and performance marketing and present it in a measurement framework so everyone can understand why we are doing what we are doing.

The Premier Inn ‘Lifestyle’ campaign

Of which initiative in your career are you the most proud?

This is something that I’ve implemented within the hotels themselves. We have a partnership with a charity called Project Art Works Based in Hastings, this charity works with adults and children who are neurodiverse, and they create amazing artwork as therapy.

We began our partnership seven years ago. We ran a test to see how their art would work in our hotels. We began with a small exhibition in a hotel lobby. We exhibited eight pieces of original art. From that experience, we realized there’s a great opportunity to make this a longer partnership.

We were launching our new Premier Plus proposition, which is our line of upgraded rooms. We realized that this charity could provide great art for our hotel rooms. They now provide art for 5,000 Premier Plus rooms.

The key thing was how can we raise awareness of neurodiversity without intruding on our guests – after all a hotel room is a private space. To solve this, we put a little plaque on each piece with the artist’s name and a QR code through to the charity.

It was a perfect meeting of values. When you’re in your room, you’re able to learn a little bit about the charity. But also, most importantly, these paintings are aesthetically really impressive. The charity got nominated for a Turner Prize last year. Enabling their artists to be shown across 5,000 of our rooms is more exposure than most small galleries would be able to achieve.

I’m most proud of this initiative, due to the legacy that it will leave and the fact that daily it is raising awareness and helping with the profile of a small charity. We even had a representative from the Arts Council sing our praises for the partnership. They’re now going to be selling the artwork as well. It is a great collaboration of two unexpected partners. It’s also something that I hope will live on in the rooms long after I’m gone.

Premier Inn’s Premier Plus rooms display art from the Hastings-based charity ‘Project Art Works’

If you can imagine your younger self at the beginning of your career, what advice might you offer her? What should a younger Yasmin do more of and what should she avoid?

I would urge her to have the confidence to disagree a bit more. Looking back, there are things I probably should have stood up for more or perhaps done differently. I’ve been lucky enough to be put on a leadership course at Whitbread, which was a year-long leadership course with the Ashridge Business School. It helped me clarify who I want to be as a leader and what I stand for. I would suggest that my younger self had the confidence to make points and stand by them.

I would also recommend to anyone early in their career that they move between different businesses to gain as much experience as possible. I was very lucky to find Whitbread – and I’ve been super-happy here for seven years. But having experience across a range of business, getting more exposure to how other organizations work, is so important. I’ve had to find other ways to build my career outside of my own business and build relationships externally as well as internally.

If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is?

If you really strip things back, marketing is about understanding people. We are all human. Research and insight are fundamental: as marketers we all need to step outside our comfort zone, look beyond the microcosm that exists within the brands that we work for and get right under the skin of what’s really going on for our customers. Only then can we respond to create meaningful communications and experiences.

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.

Little Grey Cells is Tim Healey, founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier Senior Marketer meet-up.