Yasmin Mukhida-Olushola
Head of brand marketing
Premier Inn
Yasmin Mukhida-Olushola has worked at Premier Inn owner Whitbread in a variety of roles since starting in 2017. In that time, the hotel and hospitality industry has been rocked by Covid travel restrictions and other geopolitical crises, often requiring shifts in marketing plans.
Mukhida-Olushola has been in key positions for the majority of that time. She started as brand strategy manager and was quickly promoted to the role of senior brand marketing manager. From there, she progressed to head of brand marketing in September 2021.
She explains that the biggest challenge for marketers – both in hospitality and outside the sector – is to move the needle on consideration, given the noise and competition across marketing channels: “In a world of ‘more’, as marketers, we’re going to have to compete even harder for attention. Space in someone’s brain or social feed is a hot commodity. I think ‘consideration’ as a metric is going to become increasingly difficult to shift,” she says.
She has been heavily involved in driving brand strategy for Premier Inn since before the Covid pandemic. She masterminded the strategy behind the Rest Easy campaigns with Leo Burnett, in addition to heading up the group’s DE&I network.
Prior to her work at Whitbread, she was responsible for brand marketing for glh Hotels, a position in which she honed the expertise around hospitality and hotel marketing that would go on to serve her well. It built upon work she had begun in previous marketing roles. She began her journey through the marketing industry as an account executive at Feel agency in London, a role she began in August 2010.
From the two and a half years between January 2013 and May 2015, Mukhida-Olushola worked as an account manager and subsequently as a senior account manager for Rufus Leonard (since acquired by frog, part of Capgemini Invent). As part of that role she was responsible for the account of Lloyds Bank.
During her time in the industry she has noted that the proliferation of new media channels and the rise of personalisation has had a big influence, tactically. Where once a single ‘big idea’ was the core of a marcomms campaign, the rise in the number of channels has led marketers to have to work faster and more efficiently.
She explains: “We’ve gone from spending months creating one 60-second advert to spending minutes creating a reactive six-second TikTok… so for me the biggest shift is actually around the sheer volume of assets; how do we uphold traditional brand principles of fluency at such a pace… without significantly bigger teams.”
When Marketing Week asks her to look forward to changes coming down the pipe, Mukhida-Olushola immediately turns to ChatGPT to provide an answer.
“Jokes aside,” she notes, the advent of artificial intelligence requires that marketers use their lived experiences to find ways to use it most effectively. “I think this is a difficult question to answer… but I think it’s going to be about how we – as human marketers – find the right formula of agencies, people and tech to make the most of the opportunity that AI presents us.”
"The marketing industry doesn’t need a whole load of like-minded ‘samey’ individuals, it needs way more diversity and people from all walks of life"
