Motel One Ditches the Deals for Its First Real Brand Campaign
Motel One is running the first big brand campaign in its history, as new CMO Susan Schramm shifts the budget-design hotel chain away from performance marketing toward emotion — a bet that being loved, not just found, is what drives growth from here.
For years, Motel One grew on a simple, rational promise: great locations, stylish design and fair prices. That formula built one of Europe's most distinctive budget-hotel brands. Now, under new marketing chief Susan Schramm, the company has decided that formula is no longer enough — and is spending on brand for the first time in a serious way.
From performance to brand
Schramm's argument, set out in a recent interview, is that performance marketing alone cannot win new audiences. With competition intensifying and AI-driven booking tools reshaping how travellers choose where to stay, a brand that is merely efficient at being found risks becoming interchangeable. The answer, she says, is to make Motel One more emotional — to give people a reason to feel something, not just click.
It is a notable admission. Motel One has reportedly sat at around 46% aided brand awareness in Germany — respectable, but with clear headroom, and awareness alone does not create preference. The new work, developed with agency Circus Ramezani, is designed to build the kind of emotional memory structures that performance dashboards never capture.
Why this matters beyond hotels
This is a textbook example of a lesson a lot of growth-stage businesses eventually learn the hard way. Performance marketing is brilliant at harvesting demand that already exists, but it does little to create new demand. Lean on it exclusively and you end up bidding ever harder for the same shrinking pool of in-market customers.
The AI-booking point is the sharpest part of Schramm's case. As more travel decisions are mediated by algorithms and AI agents, the brands that survive are the ones customers ask for by name — the ones with enough emotional pull that a human overrides the default. Being the brand an AI recommends is good; being the brand a person insists on is better.
The takeaway
You do not need Motel One's budget to act on this. The principle is to protect a slice of your marketing for brand-building even when performance is paying the bills, because the cheap, easy-to-measure clicks of today are borrowing against tomorrow's demand. A business that is only ever 'found' is one price cut away from being forgotten.
The risk for Motel One is execution: emotional brand work is harder to get right than a sharp price message, and the chain has little heritage of it. But the strategic call is sound. In a market being flattened by algorithms, distinctiveness and feeling are becoming the last defensible advantages.
Quick FAQ
What is Motel One's new campaign about?
It is the chain's first major brand campaign, shifting from purely rational messaging about location, design and price toward emotional brand-building, led by new CMO Susan Schramm.
Why is Motel One moving away from performance marketing?
Its marketing chief argues performance marketing alone cannot win new audiences, especially as AI-driven booking tools make it easy for efficient-but-forgettable brands to be overlooked.
What can smaller businesses learn from it?
Protect budget for brand-building even when performance is working, because performance harvests existing demand while brand creates new demand and preference.
This is the trap every growing business eventually hits: performance marketing feels safe because you can measure it, but it only ever skims demand that already exists. Spending on brand feels like a leap of faith — right up until the day your cheapest clicks dry up and nobody remembers your name. — Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing
Performance marketing harvests demand; brand creates it — and in an AI-booked world, being the name people ask for is the last real moat.
If customers could only find you through an AI assistant, would enough of them ask for you by name?
If you would like to know more about this topic, please contact us on danieln@merxmarketing.co.uk
Sources: W&V and Horizont reporting on Motel One's brand campaign and CMO Susan Schramm.
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Written by Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing Ltd and Marketing Minute
