About Candide
Candide is an AI-first tech company based at Babylonstoren in the Cape Winelands, with a second office in the UK. We build the digital products behind some of the world’s most celebrated hospitality and lifestyle estates — Babylonstoren, The Newt in Somerset, Vignamaggio, and others.
Our office sits on the Babylonstoren estate itself, surrounded by gardens, mountains, and farm-to-table food. We design, build and maintain eCommerce platforms, mobile apps, admissions and membership systems, booking engines, and brochure websites. Our team is small but high-impact, working across a portfolio of luxury brands that people genuinely love.
Role purpose
You will decide what we say to our guests, to whom, when and why — and design the personalised lifecycle journeys that deliver it across our estate brands.
Today, requests often reach our CRM team as tasks (“build this email”, “we need a form”) rather than goals. You change that. You work with each estate’s teams to understand what they want to achieve this season, turn it into a clear campaign brief, decide where it belongs in the guest journey, and work with the CRM team, who build and run the systems, to bring it to life. After every campaign you look at what happened, and make sure what worked at one estate is used at the others.
You won’t build every workflow yourself, but you do need to understand how personalisation works under the hood: what data a journey depends on, what triggers it, and what is realistic to build. The split is simple: you decide what we say, to whom and why; the CRM team decides how it is built.
Key responsibilities
Campaign planning with the estates
- Run seasonal planning sessions with the hotel, shop, restaurant, events and corporate sales teams to agree their goals and priorities.
- Turn requests into goals: before anything is built, establish who the audience is, what the message is and how success will be measured.
- Write a one-page brief for every campaign: objective, audience, message, channels, timing and how we will measure it.
- Own the guest communication calendar across brands with the CRM team, so no guest is over-mailed and campaigns don’t compete with each other.
Guest journeys and personalisation
- Map the full guest journey for each estate, from first enquiry or purchase through pre-arrival, stay, post-stay, repeat purchase and win-back, and decide where and how we should speak to guests along it.
- Design personalised lifecycle journeys: the segments, triggers, timing and content variations that make messaging reflect what we actually know about a guest, not just a first-name merge field.
- Define the segmentation logic and the data each journey needs, and raise data gaps with the CRM and data teams rather than working around them.
- Brief the CRM team on what to build, and review it before launch to check it delivers what was intended.
Message, brand and copy
- Shape the message and tone for each campaign, true to each estate’s voice.
- Write and edit guest-facing copy, and give clear, constructive feedback on creative.
- Plan campaigns with consent and opt-in in mind, working with the CRM team, who own the technical side of POPIA and GDPR compliance.
Testing, measurement and learning
- Set a hypothesis for every campaign and journey: what we expect, what happened, and what changes next.
- Run structured A/B tests and log the results so learnings compound.
- Review results with the estate team after every campaign, using reporting from the CRM and data teams.
- Share what works across Babylonstoren, The Newt and Vignamaggio, building a library of proven journeys and campaign playbooks so no estate starts from scratch.
What we’re looking for
Essential
- 3–5 years in marketing, with proven experience running campaigns end to end, from brief to results.
- Experience in hospitality, travel, food and wine, premium retail or e-commerce.
- Hands-on experience designing personalised, triggered lifecycle journeys (for example welcome, abandoned basket, pre-arrival, post-stay or win-back) in a marketing automation platform such as Klaviyo, Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Dotdigital, Mailchimp or HubSpot. The thinking matters more than the platform.
- An understanding of how personalisation works on the systems side (how segments are built, what triggers a journey and what data it depends on), enough to brief a CRM team clearly and judge what is realistic.
- Strong strategic thinking: able to explain, unprompted, how you segmented an audience and why that was the right call.
- Confidence leading planning sessions with managers and department heads, and turning their requests into clear goals.
- A good eye for brand and tone, and clear written English, including writing and editing guest-facing copy.
- Evidence you have measured your own work: a metric you moved, and how you know it was you.
Advantageous
- Hands-on HubSpot Marketing Hub experience. If you haven’t used it, we’ll train you.
- Multi-brand or multi-market marketing experience, including the UK or Europe.
- Working knowledge of POPIA and UK/EU GDPR as they apply to marketing: lawful basis, consent and opt-in.
- Experience with reporting tools such as Data Studio or Power BI.
- Working in Jira alongside a documentation tool such as Confluence or Slite.
- Afrikaans in addition to English.
How we will know it is working
- Every campaign starts with a brief, a clear goal and a way to measure it.
- Estate teams bring us goals, not just tasks, and plan their seasons with us.
- Personalised journeys cover the full guest lifecycle at each estate, with a measurable effect on repeat visits, bookings and revenue.
- What works at one estate is reused at the others.
- Guest communication feels true to each brand and never overwhelms guests.
Perks & Benefits
- Daily catered lunch.
- Flexible working hours — core hours are 9am to 3pm.
- Choice of equipment (most of us use Apple).
- Generous training and conference budget.
- 30% discount at Babylonstoren — online shop, hotel, spa, and farm shops.
- Arranged admission to Babylonstoren for you and immediate family.
- Access to Babylonstoren’s recreation centre, gym, swimming pool, and studios.
- Quarterly socials and team building.