When revenue softens, the destination marketing playbook practically writes itself. Cut the brand budget. Shift spend to performance. Run promotions. Get heads in beds.

Right now, that reflex is running across travel and hospitality at scale. Geopolitical uncertainty and softening international travel are squeezing CMO budgets. NIQ’s 2026 CMO Outlook found that the share of CEOs and CFOs who believe in brand building has dropped from 80% to 69% in two years. The pivot to short-term performance is happening industry-wide. 

The behavioral explanation for why this keeps happening isn’t complicated. Humans are wired for the status quo. Your brain prefers familiar patterns that have worked before, and “drive revenue through discounts and short-term deals” is about as familiar as it gets.

Fear sharpens that preference: “If I make a mistake, will I lose my job? If I try something new and it doesn’t work, will I get blamed?” So you do the thing that feels like the safe choice. You reach for short-term performance. 

Operating this way feels decisive. But it’s a quick-fix bandaid that ultimately hollows out the brand equity you’ve worked so hard to build. Protecting this quarter by discounting your brand’s future is a trade most destination marketers don’t realize they’re making.

The discount trap

When you reduce price to drive occupancy, you’re training your audience.

Recent peer-reviewed research on pricing strategy is direct on this. Deep discounting flattens perceived quality differences. Once you’ve conditioned travelers to expect a deal, the experience you’re offering stops feeling special at full price. You don’t just hurt this quarter’s margin. You do longer-term damage to your brand’s ability to command what it’s worth.

And then there’s the consideration-set problem. The majority of your future customers haven’t made a buying decision yet. They’re still building their wish lists. If you pull back from brand marketing, you stop showing up in that process. Performance marketing is excellent at capturing pent-up demand. It is poor at creating it. You can’t discount your way into consideration with someone who doesn’t know you exist yet.

Brands that freeze don’t recover faster

Status-quo inertia may feel like the safest bet, but it’s also a choice. One that carries more risk than you might imagine.

The landscape is littered with dead brands for whom complacency was the killer. Howard Johnson’s had 1,800 locations at its peak. Barnes & Noble owned bookselling. Walmart was the budget shopping apex predator. 

In each case, the pattern is the same. All three behemoths relied on what had worked in the past without monitoring how the ground was shifting underneath them. They found out too late that staying the course was the riskiest move they could have made.

On the flip side, companies that prioritize brand as a long-term investment even in times of instability perform more durably. Case in point: companies that held the line on brand investment during COVID came out of it faster and stronger than the ones that cut. 

A calculated risk beats no chance at all. 

The mindset shift that actually protects you

Loss aversion is working against you here. Researchers have found that the fear of losing what you have consistently outweighs the appeal of what you might gain. So when external forces hit your revenue, the pull toward safety is strong. Tighten the budget. Pull back on what feels uncertain. Double down on what has worked. The risk of trying something new feels bigger than the cost of standing still.

Taking a calculated risk is the first move. Sustained brand investment is how you take it. That means staying close enough to your existing audience to know how they’re changing. And it also means building the brand presence that puts you in front of new ones you haven’t reached yet.

Your current audience’s behavior will shift over time, even if it’s minor. Buying decisions evolve. Priorities change. A brand that stays closely attuned to those shifts, and keeps its messaging aligned with where its audience’s motivations actually are, will consistently outperform competitors that are still marketing to a version of the customer that existed two years ago.

Beyond that, most destinations and hospitality brands have more audience flexibility than they use. The product you market to your core visitor can often serve a completely different audience if you frame it right.

For instance, North Face doesn’t just sell Summit Series fleece to hardcore mountaineers. That same jacket can be used by suburbanites to walk their dogs on cold mornings. The product is identical. But the audience it reaches and the value it delivers are completely different. Leaving that second audience to discover you by accident is an incomplete marketing strategy.

Reframing your brand and existing offerings to reach adjacent audiences is a way of using what you already have. And when market conditions shift again, you’ll be in a better position because you’ve built a broader base. 

Think like an investor, not a fortress builder

Brand versus performance doesn’t have to be an either/or. Think of it the way any sensible investor thinks about a portfolio: diversified, deliberate, and with room for at least one speculative bet.

In practice, that means some of your spend stays on brand. Keeping your destination visible with audiences who aren’t ready to book yet. Holding your position in the consideration set while competitors pull back. Some goes to performance, capturing the visitors already in motion. And a portion stays genuinely speculative: a different audience segment, a reframed offering, a package built for someone you haven’t marketed to before. It may not pay off. But you’ll learn something. And occasionally it opens a sustainable new line of revenue.

The goal isn’t choosing brand over performance. It’s funding both deliberately and letting each do the job it’s actually good at.

The question to ask right now

Downward pressure makes most teams ask: “How do we protect what we have?” The better question is: “What are we assuming about our audience that we haven’t tested recently?”

That’s what you can do differently. Monitor your audience’s motivations the way you monitor your campaigns. Keep your brand present in the consideration set, even when times are tight. Expand your audience while conditions are stable enough to experiment. And treat the uncertainty itself as the signal to move, not the reason to freeze.

OFF Madison Ave applies behavioral science to destination and hospitality marketing to help brands move when the market makes most of their competitors hesitate. If you’re rethinking your approach, we should talk.