CMO Superhero Hannah Fisher is Breaking the Rules: Saga's CMO on Rewriting the Silver Generation Marketing Playbook
In this CMO Superhero series of interviews, a precursor to writing a book on Share of Experience – the Superhero Metric, we explore the stories of extraordinary CMOs in building their brands. Discover key takeaways from the business and measurement challenges these CMOs face and find out what Claude.ai identifies as their three top superpowers.
Meet Hannah Fisher.
While most marketers obsess over Gen Z, Hannah F has been quietly orchestrating one of the most fascinating digital transformations in travel. As Saga's CMO, she's challenged every assumption about marketing to older audiences, proving that conventional wisdom about age, channels, and customer behavior needs a serious update. Here's her story of ripping up the marketing rulebook.
Q: Most brands dream of having loyal customers. Yet you walked into Saga facing what you called a "North Star challenge" with yours. What was that about?
A: "We have exceptionally loyal customers that have been with us for many years, who we love dearly. But obviously we're all growing older together and our challenge as a brand is to bring in the younger end of our demographic."
What’s interesting is, by "younger," Hannah means 65+. "For cruise, it's more the 65-year-old sweet spot." It's a paradox few marketers face: how do you attract the "younger" older market (while keeping your existing loyal base happy)?
Q: The traditional playbook would say older audiences need traditional channels. You took a different view. What did you do?
A: "For the younger 65-year-olds these days, of course, digital is very much something they're very at ease with and can use tablets and desktops and mobile phones and are quite comfortable operating in that way."
But here's where it gets interesting. Instead of a radical digital transformation, Hannah took a more nuanced approach: "I call it the shop window. You can't change the shop window until you have something else that's working equally well. So we're not going to stop sending our brochures and stop the phones ringing. But we want the website to be equal to the performance of the call centres. And we want to give our customers a choice in how they communicate and buy from us."
Q: Although we know from the work done by Les Binet and Peter Field that investing in brand marketing is vital for a healthy brand, it is hard to deliver on this. You made a controversial move with your marketing budget that goes against current trends. What did you do?
A: "When I looked at the marketing investment, we were roughly operating about 25% brand, 75% performance and that now has significantly shifted. We are about 40/45% brand and 60/55% performance."
Q: In an era where most brands are cutting brand spending in favor of performance marketing, this was a bold move. What were the results?
A: “The results are profound. In 2024, we achieved our fastest-selling season ever, highest gross revenue on record, a 14% increase in Ave Rev Per Pax, an increase of 12% in online sales and CPA reduction by 30% (2021-2024). These results demonstrate a culmination of efforts across our Marketing Transformation programme and from putting the customer and insight at the heart of everything they do.”
Let that sink in – more brand investment led to better performance metrics.
Q: Most brands talk about customer journeys. You've built what you call a "connected ecosystem." What's the difference?
This isn't your typical marketing funnel that ends in the purchase itself. Hannah's team built deep post-purchase engagement:
A: "Once customers have purchased we then have a post purchase, pre departure communications plan to help our guests with FAQs. We talk to them with advice ahead of their cruise sharing information on our formal night - you know, what to wear, and information on what to bring, what to pack, all of those helpful hints, so by the time they get to onboarding and sailing away they feel reassured."
But it goes deeper: "Every guest experience is important to us and we measure our guest satisfaction by C-Sat and NPS metrics. Every cruise gets measured from an NPS perspective and that measurement is across all the aspects of the experience. That can be from entertainment to food to onboarding, to their purchase experience as well. We use these metrics to fine tune and continually improve our Cruising experience for our guests."
Q: In an age of AI hype, you've taken a more measured approach to innovation. Why?
A: "I think there's a huge opportunity for AI... personally I see it as a way to enhance and speed up manual processes and to take some of the admin work out... to enable my team to then focus on the action and deployment rather than the actual doing of some of the processes."
While other brands rush to implement every new technology, Hannah's approach is refreshingly pragmatic: "We use our partners like Audiences to help us step forward into the more innovative, data-driven and proactive areas, but with protection."
Q: Let's talk about the elephant in the room – marketing measurement. Many CMOs claim to have it figured out. You have a different take. What is it?
A: Here's a candid revelation few marketing leaders will admit: "We spend too much time trying to connect the dots rather than actually the time on the output. We particularly struggle with multi-channel attribution... trying to work out what really drives what. And I think we have a fragmented data landscape where we’ve got data trapped into different systems."
(This is one for Share of Experience to come to the rescue…but another day!)
Q: Now you have full cruise ships (91% capacity), increased online sales (12%) and reduced acquisition costs (30% reduction in CPA), the results speak for themselves, but which metrics really matter to you?
What Hannah talks about is a human metric.
A: “Business and Marketing Performance are of course important, but equally is our focus on happy guests and happy employees. We measure our employee engagement through eNPS, and have seen Cruise Marketing Scores increase from 7.2 – 9.2 (from 2023 to 2024). Knowing that the Cruise Marketing Team is so engaged despite the Transformation and change, is something that means a lot to me. We are also getting external recognition. In 2024, the team won four British Travel Awards including Gold for Best Luxury Cruise Line and Bronze for Best River Cruise Holiday.”
So, what are the five key takeaways for marketing leaders?
Hannah's transformation at Saga proves you can:
Overall, what should we take out? Stop following the standard marketing playbook and write your own rules based on your unique audience and objectives. I particularly like the human metric because however good your strategy, galvanizing your team enables this strategy to see the light of day.
To discover how Claude.ai uncovered Hannah’s three top superpowers, click here.
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Author: Fiona Blades: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fionablades/