Subscriber Exclusive 
Airbnb’s narrative and reinstating the CMO: Your Marketing Week
At the end of every week, we look at the key stories, offering our view on what they mean for you and the industry. From Airbnb’s desire to control the narrative to Gap reinstating the CMO role, it’s been a busy week. Here is my take.
Change the narrative
Change the narrativeWe got further insight into why Airbnb made the call a few years back to cut spend in performance marketing and ramp up brand investment this week. “You don’t get a chance to own your own narrative,” the brand’s CMO Hiroki Asai told us.
Like many startups, Airbnb fell into the trap of initially focusing its marketing solely on bottom-of-the-funnel performance channels that did little to build its brand equity.
