Damion Lepp

Twenty-five years in hospitality marketing across four continents has a way of teaching you things that no university course can. Starting out in Adelaide, cutting teeth in street press journalism and multi-venue pub marketing, then moving through Sydney's competitive hotel scene, into London's fine dining and luxury hotel world, and eventually into fractional leadership for global restaurant groups, the journey has been anything but linear. That variety is precisely what makes the work interesting, and the experience genuinely rounded.

Early career service in the Australian Army laid a quiet but enduring foundation for everything that followed. The experience instilled an understanding that real leadership is about bringing people with you, making decisions under pressure, and recognising that the person beside you matters as much as the mission itself. Those lessons have shaped how teams are built and run ever since.

With over 25 years of senior marketing leadership across global hospitality, media, and technology, the focus has always been on building marketing functions that deliver lasting commercial results for some of the world's most recognised restaurant groups, hotel portfolios, cocktail bars, and entertainment brands. A career spanning the full spectrum of hospitality, from high-volume casual dining and traditional pub operations through to Michelin-calibre fine dining, luxury five-star hotels, and internationally acclaimed cocktail bars, provides a depth of commercial understanding that informs every strategic decision and ensures the right approach is applied to the right environment.

Across roles in London, Sydney, Stockholm, Dubai, and beyond, marketing responsibility has stretched across multiple venues and brands simultaneously, developing strategies that are both locally relevant and globally coherent. Overseeing the marketing of five-star hotel portfolios alongside QSR restaurants and bar programmes, running national campaigns across 13 Australian hotels, and guiding global brand development for restaurant groups spanning the UK, Middle East, US, and Europe has sharpened the ability to deploy resources intelligently, adapt tone and positioning by segment, and deliver measurable commercial results across very different audiences.

On brands: a brand is not a social media post, and it is not a colour palette or a font choice. It starts with the vision of founders, owners, directors, and boards, the reason the business exists, what it stands for, and the experience it wants to create for its customers. The work is translating that vision into something a customer can genuinely feel, whether they are reading a piece of content, walking through a door, or sitting at a table. Done properly, it creates stories that resonate, build loyalty, and give people a reason to return and to tell others. This has been the consistent approach across casual dining, traditional pub culture, premium cocktail bars, Michelin-level fine dining, and five-star hotel portfolios. The format changes depending on the brand. The principle never does.

Brand development work is grounded in clarity and consistency, whether building identities from inception, revitalising tired brands, or guiding franchisee networks in maintaining global standards across multiple markets. The same thinking applies whether directing a premium repositioning for a global restaurant group or developing an irreverent social media personality for a Bavarian-themed bar concept. Every decision comes back to whether it serves the brand story and moves the customer closer to it.

Local area marketing sits at the heart of venue performance. The most effective campaigns connect a venue to the community around it through genuine partnerships, loyalty programmes, and data capture systems that convert passing footfall into long-term guests. Integrating WiFi, POS, and CRM technologies creates unified customer profiles that inform everything from email campaigns to menu development, giving operators the intelligence to make smarter commercial decisions.

Digital expertise covers SEO, GEO, SEM, performance marketing, and the emerging discipline of generative engine optimisation, ensuring the brands in the portfolio are found, considered, and chosen. Building HubSpot infrastructure, implementing GA4 and GTM frameworks, and developing AI-powered automation systems has delivered a 40% improvement in lead conversion and a 35% reduction in customer churn across client portfolios. The creative and the commercial are not in tension. When both are working properly, they reinforce each other, and the results speak clearly.

The philosophy around team leadership is one of collective momentum built on individual strengths. The approach has never been to direct from above, but to understand what each person genuinely brings and create the conditions for those talents to contribute meaningfully to a shared goal. That philosophy runs through every team environment, from managing national hotel marketing across 13 Australian properties, to leading 15 professionals across multiple countries at Noble Restaurant Group, to nurturing a global contributor network of 80 writers and creators at Decoded Magazine spanning every time zone imaginable.

Everyone from junior coordinators to senior leads is brought into the strategy, the KPIs, and the commercial goals, because those goals need to feel real and shared rather than handed down. Teams perform best when each member understands their value within the wider picture, so genuine effort goes into fostering a culture of respect, open communication, and job satisfaction that people actually feel day to day. On-the-job coaching is embedded into the workflow so that knowledge transfer happens organically, skills develop in context, and nobody is left to figure things out alone. Where capability gaps exist, they are addressed directly through structured external training, industry certifications, and relevant courses that raise individual expertise and lift the collective standard of the whole team. Individual wins are acknowledged and celebrated, because a team that recognises its own progress builds confidence, raises its own bar, and naturally looks out for each other. That environment, one of respect, investment, and shared ambition, is where the best work consistently comes from.

Recognised across Australian, British, and international industry awards, with clients receiving accolades from Restaurant of the Year to International Company of the Year, the standard brought to every brief remains the same. Whether working as an embedded Marketing Director or as a Fractional CMO engaged to lead a specific transformation, the commitment is always to strategic rigour, commercial accountability, and the belief that great marketing is built by great teams who care about what they are creating together.