In the shoes of a CMO

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Laurent Blassin (Thalasseo): “Technology does not replace curiosity or critical thinking”

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Laurent Blassin is Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Impact/CSR at Thalasseo, an online travel agency specialising in wellness stays. The platform lists nearly 350 establishments, including thalassotherapy centres and spa hotels, and offers more than 1,000 packages worldwide.

Before joining Thalasseo in summer 2025, Laurent spent nearly ten years at EY Studio+ (formerly Fabernovel), where he created and led the marketing consulting team, before developing an offering dedicated to sustainable marketing.

A member of the executive committee, he now oversees a broad scope: acquisition, retention, communication, brand, and customer experience, in addition to structuring the company’s CSR strategy following Thalasseo’s acquisition by the impact fund CAP Autrement.

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Your role covers both marketing and CSR. How do you articulate these two dimensions?

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Laurent Blassin:
We first defined a five-year vision, and we are now entering the operational phase. This is where tensions between financial and non-financial objectives become most visible.

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On the one hand, there are clear financial objectives: revenue growth, margin improvement, and profitability management. On the other, environmental and social commitments that may, in certain trade-offs, conflict with this logic.

In the travel sector, this is very concrete. If we aim to reduce carbon impact, this may involve questioning the promotion of stays that require air travel. This type of decision is never economically neutral.

Finally, one point seems essential to me: CSR must be carried at the executive committee level. Without this, it remains secondary and does not truly influence structuring decisions. The fact that it is attached to marketing may raise questions. It is therefore essential to clearly separate what relates to the impact strategy from what relates to its narrative.

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What were the first marketing initiatives you focused on when you joined?

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L.B.:
The company was historically very offer-driven and less customer-oriented. There was no personalisation: the same newsletter was sent to the entire database, mixing very different offers.

My priority was to understand our customers precisely. I cross-referenced the available data: origin, destination, type of stay, group size, booking lead time. This allows us to identify clear patterns.

For example, 60% of solo bookings are made less than fifteen days before departure. These are mostly women over fifty, looking for treatments and sometimes social connection.

By contrast, the “disconnection” segment includes more couples, on short weekend stays, with different expectations. These segments do not speak to each other in the same way. Marketing must reflect this diversity.

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How do you approach SEO and GEO?

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L.B.:
Thalasseo has historically been a very performance-driven company, with a strong dependence on Google. When this player evolves, we feel it immediately. I believe we are approaching a ceiling with this model.

In SEO, traditional levers are showing their limits. Sponsored results occupy an increasing share of space, and clicks on organic results are decreasing. At the same time, new uses are emerging with conversational interfaces, GEO, and large language models.

Our historical customer base is not yet strongly impacted, but it will be quickly, and our target audience is already using these tools for inspiration or recommendations.

In this context, my main objective is to strengthen the brand. Today, many customers come to us via Google, but often it does not go further. Without a direct relationship and a memorable brand, there is no loyalty.

The objective is therefore to build brand preference, not just to optimise a position in search results.

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What role does artificial intelligence play?

L.B.:
Artificial intelligence is present at all levels and ultimately across all my marketing tasks: monitoring, data analysis, creation, and more. It plays a central role, but always as a support or acceleration dynamic.

Internally, we are still in a strong phase of experimentation and iteration to identify the best use cases and tools across all functions.

I am particularly interested in conversational AI as a support tool. Choosing a stay online, selecting treatments, comparing establishments—this is often done alone, in front of a screen, without interaction. Some customers need reassurance, but we cannot mobilise a call centre at every stage of the journey.

The question is therefore the following: can AI provide personalised answers and smooth the experience, so that human intervention is reserved for situations that are truly complex or sensitive?

I also test AI for qualitative research. Some solutions make it possible to conduct user interviews in an automated way, with the ability to follow up in real time. This opens up interesting perspectives in terms of volume and speed, without excluding human analysis.

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How do you arbitrate between in-house and external resources?

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L.B.:
For a small structure like ours, hiring internally is a significant commitment. Today, I proportionally have more external resources than internal ones.

I choose to internalise expertise where it is important to ensure continuity and not be strategically dependent on a third party. It is almost a question of sovereignty. For brand work, for example, it seems important to have a “signature” and therefore an internal reference.

Externalisation offers other advantages. Freelancers, for example, are relevant in a logic of agility, where we need flexible resources without making the structure heavier, or to test new organisational models.

Agencies or consulting firms bring another level of depth. They devote time to innovation, are better equipped, have more structured methodologies, and benefit from exposure to varied client contexts.

This ability to cross-learn, detect weak signals, and challenge practices is particularly valuable on topics such as SEO, GEO, or media, where the environment evolves rapidly.

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We often hear about the “death of the CMO.” What is your view?

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L.B.:
The highly specialised CMO—either purely branding or purely performance—is probably more exposed. Organisations need profiles capable of navigating between these two worlds.

The CMO who can combine analysis, creativity, and transversal leadership becomes central, because they connect strategic vision with operational execution.

In B2C, they carry the voice of the customer within the organisation. This implies not only understanding data and business indicators, but also interpreting expectations and weak signals from the market, and translating them into concrete decisions.

They must be able to align commercial, tech, and product teams around a shared understanding.

Technology can compensate for certain technical gaps and strengthen analytical capacity, but it will never replace curiosity, critical thinking, or the ability to bring people together.

These human qualities, at the intersection of business and customer empathy, are what make the role as strategic as ever.

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