At TheFork, a restaurant reservation platform operating in over ten countries, Pauline Bodin leads the marketing and e-commerce strategy for the gift card business in France, Italy, and Spain. This product, while distinct from TheFork’s core business of table reservations, has in just a few years become a real growth driver.

In response to increasingly demanding customers, Pauline Bodin positions marketing as a direct contributor to both experience and performance. In this interview, she shares her vision of a profession in transformation—closer than ever to customer expectations and business needs.

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What are the main challenges you face today ?

‍Pauline Bodin: My role rests on three main pillars: strategic alignment with the company, customer satisfaction, and team management. One of my primary goals is to ensure that marketing—including for a specific vertical like gift cards—is aligned with TheFork’s overall strategy. It’s about demonstrating, with data, that our actions have a tangible business impact: revenue growth, improved acquisition metrics, retention…

Then, there’s the customer relationship. We’re dealing with an increasingly volatile and demanding audience. To meet these expectations, we need to create memorable experiences, offer differentiated products, and above all, capture the right moments. For gift cards, 70% of B2C revenue is generated in the last quarter, with a surge between December 20 and 25. It’s a highly concentrated activity, where visibility, packaging, and product accessibility make all the difference.

The third challenge is the team. At TheFork, the marketing teams are young, talented, and eager for support. In this context, my role isn’t just strategic: I’m also a mentor. Developing soft skills, understanding business stakes, and the ability to collaborate across functions—all of that is essential to help talents grow and create a sustainable team dynamic.

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How do you balance performance, brand, and profitability ?

P.B.: Our mission is simple to state but complex to execute: profitable growth. In the gift card vertical, we’ve secured a significant increase in our marketing budgets because we’ve proven that each euro invested generates measurable growth. This ability to demonstrate return on investment has been key.

Our collaboration with Spaag has been instrumental in this. From the start, we worked together to build a performance cockpit: weekly reporting, tight sales tracking, and alignment on performance indicators. Thanks to this foundational work, we were able to industrialize our analysis and secure budget decisions. The result: controlled acceleration, based on concrete data and strong execution discipline.

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What has been the impact of your collaboration with Spaag ?

P.B.: What I particularly appreciate about working with Spaag is that it’s not a traditional agency. They’re a fully integrated partner within my team. They have access to sensitive and strategic data, take part in key decisions, and share our objectives. This mutual trust and transparency are key success factors.

We started with a focused six-month project. Over time, the collaboration expanded to cover all the levers we identified as growth drivers. Today, Spaag supports us far beyond paid performance: SEO, content, building B2B customer cases, multichannel strategies… This continuity in the relationship allows us to aim for sustainable growth, beyond simple acquisition tactics.

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How has your view of marketing evolved ?

P.B.: Marketing is now fully embedded in the company. It’s no longer just about execution—it touches everything: product, finance, data, HR. Today, a marketing leader is expected to analyze and understand both business and human challenges while working cross-functionally. You have to be able to engage with engineers, salespeople, product teams, and external partners alike.

From a technological standpoint, marketing roles are becoming more and more tech-driven. There’s no such thing as digital marketing anymore—all marketing is digital. Artificial intelligence, for example, is already part of our daily operations: for improving copywriting, creating visuals, or optimizing certain processes. These are useful tools that save us time—but they don’t replace strategic thinking.

And that’s the real luxury today: time. Time to shape a strategy, analyze, test, learn, iterate. That’s what a long-term collaboration like the one we have with Spaag enables. And it’s also what I strive to preserve for my teams: time to understand, structure, and anticipate.

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What qualities do you look for in your teams today ?

P.B.: Three words come to mind right away: agility, curiosity, and team spirit. In such a fast-changing environment, you need to constantly adapt, learn quickly, and understand the expectations of others. Marketing touches every function: finance, product, tech, sales… You need to be able to speak with everyone and grasp each one's challenges.

And as I said before, there’s another reality: digital is no longer a department. Everything is digital. Everything is business. Marketers today must master tools, read data, leverage technology—while maintaining a deeply human approach. That balance—between technical and relational, between strategic and operational—is what makes the job so rich.

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