Six questions. Six bite-sized answers. In this week’s interview, Motorway’s Director of Marketing & Brand shares why brands need one connected system that compounds over time and how the key to building a great team is balancing head and heart.

“The real skill is being recognisably yourself everywhere, no matter who tells the story.”

What myth would you like to bust about marketing?

That marketing is a campaign or a channel. Debating whether to be 'TV-first' or 'social-first' answers the wrong question because it asks where to spend, rather than how everything works together as a system. Real growth comes from organising teams and efforts horizontally. When brand, growth, content, PR, and CX sit in one room working towards shared outcomes and jobs-to-be-done rather than siloed channel targets, you build a marketing engine that performs everywhere. A campaign launches and ends, whereas a system gets run and compounds over time.

Other than your own - which brand do you most admire and why?

M&S. Not for one single campaign, but because they’re the best masterclass in modernising without losing who you are. Everything anchors back to one core idea around quality you can trust. But look at how that shows up: an Ibiza fashion runway on livestream, local store teams making TikToks, Gillian Anderson and creator-led partnerships. Different channels, but always the exact same character and values. That’s the hardest thing to pull off in marketing. Most brands either freeze or lose their identity chasing trends but M&S proves you can move fast, take risks and not lose your sense of self.

In order to lead a great team, what one thing should any aspiring leader not ignore?

For me, it comes down to balancing head and heart, what I call being a 'whole-brained' leader. Day-to-day, it’s about taking the time to figure out what actually makes each person tick, pulling the quieter voices into the room, and getting the right mix of people working together. I hold a really high bar on standards, but my job is to give the team the aircover to hit them. I act as a strategic filter, always absorbing executive noise and commercial pressure from above so my team has the psychological safety to just focus on doing great work.

Car selling has never had a genuinely distinctive voice and message, with every player in the category sounding the same. It's Not Magic. It's Motorway’ broke that mould deliberately. More than just a nice piece of creative, it has shifted brand perceptions and remained a strong commercial lever for the business.

Where does your best thinking happen - and why?

Outside the marketing bubble and out in broader culture, whether that’s independent films, galleries or the latest journalism and Substack. That’s where you actually see how mood, behaviour, and aesthetics are shifting long before our industry catches up. You're reading the temperature of the moment, rather than the LinkedIn 'marketing take' on it. Breakthrough strategic thinking usually happens over a real-world conversation, not just staring at a brief.

In marketing, what have you changed your mind about?

That personalisation is the answer everywhere. At the top of the funnel especially, it matters far less than we think because fame is best built through shared moments and messages, not a slightly different one for everyone. Personalisation works when it's genuinely helpful, and in the right channels - email being a safe space, for example, where people expect and welcome it. There's a tendency today to think ‘more content, everywhere’ is the answer. Actually, it's the opposite: less content, more relevant, in the moments that matter.

Which marketing rule still holds, no matter what?

Consistency, but redefined. It used to mean saying the exact same thing everywhere. Today, half your brand story is told in places you don’t control: by creators, in Reddit threads, or by an LLM giving a recommendation. So the real skill is being recognisably yourself everywhere, no matter who tells the story. That only works if your brand is built as an internal operating system, so everyone in the business can apply it to the decisions they make daily. It's why our product team writes ‘Ta-da!’ instead of ‘Transaction confirmed’ when a car sells. Not because a brand guideline told them to, but because they know how that moment should feel for a seller. That's what real consistency looks like.

Cassandra Hall is the Marketing & Brand Director at Motorway, the UK's biggest car-selling platform, where she is disrupting the automotive space by embedding the brand into mainstream culture: from the flagship ‘It’s Not Magic, It’s Motorway’ platform to major World Cup activations and female and family-first partnerships. Specialising in brand as a commercial lever, Cassandra is pioneering how to build and scale brands in an AI-first world through LLM optimisation, content innovation, and agile operating models. Previously, she led marketing at Zoopla, turning it into a homeowner obsession, following a decade agency-side shaping strategy for Virgin Atlantic, Diageo and many other brands.

Tim Healey listens, learns, and synthesises real-world best practices from hundreds of marketing professionals and presents them in these weekly interviews for MAD//Fest. Tim’s Little Grey Cells Club is a trusted, no-sales, peer-driven network where senior-level marketing directors unite to confront challenges, and drive leadership forward.