Montpellier native Caroline Bruel approaches Club Med's communications with classic training in law, marketing and investor relations. Andrew Thomas visits the holiday brand

Photographs by Eric Malemanche

There’s something of a cult about luxury holiday brand Club Mediterranee, known globally as Club Med. The pastel t-shirts – emblazoned with the ‘quarante-cinq’ slogans – the communal pre-dinner singing, the crocodile of chanting children participating in the call-and-response cry: “on est pas fatigués.” They’re all, staff and holidaymakers alike, so damned happy. But it’s the evangelism that is most striking. GMs and GOs (as staff and holidaymakers are known) are always so keen to express just how happy they are.

The near-religious zeal isn’t limited to the GMs (gentile membres) who staff the 80 resorts around the world; it extends through head office staff and certainly reaches director of communication, Caroline Bruel.

“When I was approached for the head of IR position I was very excited,” says Bruel about the initial role at Club Med that lured her from a similar role at hotel chain Accor. ”I had spent all my holidays as a child with my parents at Club Med since I was five years old. It was a very important factor in accepting the job.”

The fervour felt by those who holiday with the company has increased as the company has transitioned over the past five years.

During the global crash of 2008 there were only two options for holiday firms: luxury or low-cost. “Club-Med were somewhere in the middle of a polarised market. If anything, we were the most expensive of the mid-cost market,” says Bruel. Not a good place to be, but Club Med had seen the writing on the wall before the economic downturn and had already embarked on a major brand transformation. It closed or sold the properties that were losing money, and even some that weren’t but which were perceived as too downmarket. The brand started to change.

“It took longer than expected,” notes Bruel. “The change process started in 2004 and finally by 2012, we had achieved all of our goals. Now we have done everything from those 2004 plans. Two-thirds of our property portfolio is comprised of high-end products, our financial structure is very healthy and we have only 21% gearing.”

Club Med’s transition continues. In June, its two largest investors, Fosun, first private conglomerate of China and French private equity group Axa, were willing to pay €540m to take control of the French-listed holiday brand. Henri Giscard d’Estaing, Club Med’s chief executive and son of former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, remains in charge. All sides have deemed the deal entirely logical. In 2012, China overtook the U.S. and Germany to become the world’s largest outbound tourism nation. Although much of Chinese tourism is focused on other Asian nations, their love of France and French brands must have been a strong factor in Fosun’s decision. Certainly the markets appreciated the move – Club Med’s share price soared 22% after the deal was finalised and Fosun saw a healthy 4.6% surge.

For Bruel, these seem changes she will easily take in stride. Her first experience in overseas markets came well in advance of most. At 16, she left a middle class upbringing in suburban Montpellier to spend a year in America on a foreign exchange trip. It was an eye- opening experience and allowed her to understand the perceptions of others. “This was the 1980’s. We thought we lived in a globalised world, but it was parochial compared to today. People would ask me if it was true that we didn’t have cars in France, and that everyone was on bicycles. This from people in the middle of nowhere, in the heart of Amish country.” But Bruel loved her time in Pennsylvania, “No, the people weren’t very worldly, but they had big hearts.”

Bruel exudes a subtle dislike of national stereotypes, a quality perhaps essential for a career with Club Med. “In France, I had been told Americans were superficial, but my ‘American family’, as I call them, still write to me. I learned so much from them and so much about community from my time in America. I think I really learned the American spirit.”

She came back and, after finishing her law degree, decided to return to the U.S. to continue her studies. “I thought of being a company lawyer, but university law is so academic. I felt I needed to understand company strategy.” With this in mind, Bruel enrolled in a marketing course at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bruel advises anyone pursuing a legal career to enrol in some kind of communications course, marketing or corporate. “I chose marketing because I was looking at consumer law. But nowadays people should look at pursuing an MBA. It is very important to open your minds to the corporate world. In that sense, going to either a business school that is aligned to the working world or going to America is very important. Understanding marketing is very important too. It helps you understand the logic of a company. It’s as important as understanding finance.”

Bruel opted to study in California to rekindle her long-time love affair with America, but the spark was not there. She left, happy to return to and start her career in France.

However, the return to her native France was not as easy as she thought it would be. Determined to get an in-house legal position she was quickly shortlisted by EuroDisney. It was the first job to which she had applied and she was convinced that she would be accepted, “I had lots of interviews for the role, I had a good feeling about it and I thought the job was mine. I didn’t get it and I was really shocked when I didn’t. And so I got disappointed.”

In an attempt to shake his daughter out of her melancholy, Bruel’s father introduced her to Nancy Teitelbaum, a former equities trader. Teitelbaum was setting up a European office of a United States investor relations advisory practice called Morgen-Walke Associates (subsequently acquired by Financial Dynamics, now FTI Consulting). Teitelbaum was uncertain of the kind of person she wanted for the role. Bruel says, “She couldn’t work out whether she wanted a personal assistant or a clever out-of-school student who could help set the business up.”

Morgen-Walke was launching its European operation with two main customers, ST microelectronics, and Gucci which was about to dual list. Although uncertain of what she wanted from her new recruit, the one skill Teitelbaum knew she needed was expertise in investor relations.

“I didn’t know what IR was,” Bruel says. “I studied law because my father, also a lawyer, had encouraged me, but I have never been in love with maths. Now suddenly I was working for an American firm talking to mathematicians, to analysts and to people on the stock exchange, and to begin with I was quite lost. But I realised I just needed to learn it.”

Bruel learned fast with the help of a handful of good teachers. “Morgen-Walke were revolutionaries. They were ahead of their time - providing IR strategy and support but also media relations”.

Bruel says this convergence of communications which began in the 1990s, has now become the accepted model.Investor and financial communications now requires working with the buy-side and the sell- side as well as with journalists and the media. “If a communications adviser is unable to provide financial communications advice and support, financial press understanding and even support consumer communications then they are not doing their job properly. And they have to do all those skills on a global stage.”

At Morgen-Walke, Bruel certainly got the taste for those skills. As a small agency she had to be ready to turn her hand to all areas, so her knowledge and experience swiftly grew. After three years, Teitelbaum’s departure from the agency was closely followed by a call from a head hunter who persuaded Bruel to interview for the number two in-house IR role at Accor.

The head of Accor’s investor relations team was Eliane Rouyer, a big name in IR. Rouyer is president of CLIFF (French IR society, Association Française des Investor Relations). Rouyer specialised in the buy-side, and Bruel’s role was to look after relations with the sell- side. Although she’d worked with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and others during her time at Morgen-Walke she still found it a shock. “It was tough at first because I was in the front line of analysts in London, and there were a lot of difficult questions. I had to go into more detail than I was used to and it took me six months to really feel comfortable with the story.”

Once Bruel had the story down, she began to love the role. However, she knew that the position had a ceiling. Although Eliane Rouyer is now director of communication, she spent 35 years as ‘directeur de la communication financière’ and only broadened her breadth of responsibility in 2010. With no option to move up, the only way for Bruel to progress was to move on. In 2004, the top IR role at Club Med became vacant, and

Bruel leapt at the chance to join an organisation of which she had grown up a customer. She started as IRO and her tenacity during the tough years of Club Med’s transition to a luxury brand paid off when, in 2011, she was appointed VP for communication. Her IR responsibilities, however didn’t make the leap with her, despite Bruel’s experience at building the function from the bottom up.

“When I arrived, IR had quite recently become a department. The guy who had run it was a former financial controller; he was much more financial than communication strategy although he was as a Marseillais, very talkative. He was still taking figures from the financial ERP. If anything, this was something that really depressed me when I started. My added value was in strategic communications and this was all being outsourced to an external agency. My first two years were spent wrestling control back in-house.”

Bruel was promoted in November 2011, 18 months before the business was brought back into private ownership. The investor relations function continued to report to the CFO, meaning that Bruel’s role is safe within the new structure. She is evidently delighted to be staying at Club Med. In her strongly accented, though excellent, English she gushes “I am very excited about the future. When I stop to think about the journey of my career I realise this is a fantastic moment.”

Her role now includes corporate PR, events, partnerships; the traditional areas of corporate communications. She is hoping that, going forward she will become more responsible for the Club Med brand.

The one area she is unlikely to broach in the near future is internal communications. That lies very squarely with the human resources function at Club Med. It is, after all, a people-centred business.