NEWS
Extreme Makeover-Air Canada Edition: How do you mend a broken brand?
by Andy Holloway, June 7, 2004
Tell someone an airplane horror story--delayed flight, rude service, lost luggage--and people are likely to assume it's about Air Canada. That's how far the beleaguered airline has sunk in the eyes of Canadians, who, in an exclusive survey conducted by Spencer Francey Peters and the Strategic Counsel, voted it the worst-managed brand in the country by a landslide. In fact, 46% of those surveyed said that of 157 companies, Air Canada stood out as the one with the most tarnished brand. (The next-lowest brands came in far behind, at 16%.) Canadians love to hate Air Canada even more than they do the banks and cellphone providers--two more traditional targets. Some might even be happy to see Air Canada permanently grounded.
Yet Air Canada is a well-recognized brand, and 10% of respondents actually felt it was the second-best-managed name in the travel and transportation sector (WestJet came first at 31%). So perhaps there's something worth saving here. But when--or if--the troubled airline emerges from bankruptcy protection, the hard work of winning back customers' hearts and minds will really begin. And it's clear that merely changing the name or painting the planes isn't going to be enough.
We called in a top-notch marketing, branding and advertising team--Garo Keresteci of Fuse Marketing Group in Toronto, Marie Germain, the Brighton, Ont., head of Brand Revival, and Gary Prouk of Sebastian Consultancy in Toronto--to brainstorm ideas for getting Air Canada off the runway. Here are their prescriptions for an extreme makeover of Canada's ugliest brand.
Canadian Business: Let's assume Air Canada has its financial house in order and has money to spend. It wants to start regaining consumer trust and loyalty. How?
Keresteci: The first day this deal is done, they should get up and say, "This is the problem we got ourselves into, here's what we're going to do about it, and here's how to give us feedback." And they should act on that feedback on a real-time basis. But they have to be transparent about their fares and about how they do business with all their stakeholders, including their employees. And they have not been transparent.
Germain: They made a lot of mistakes with their fares. They did some marketing with their fares without including the taxes or one-way and so on. But what company isn't guilty of doing that to some extent, to endear the public to their price point? It's a waste of time, though, because a brand isn't built on a price. I think price is the opposite of a brand. People are willing to pay more, always, for a very special experience.
Prouk: They've been sodomizing expectations for so long. It's been endemic with Air Canada for the past 30 years. You can't rape those people who are paying for first or business class, and then open it up to the world [with free upgrades]. There has to be a distinction.It's like two-tier medicine. If you pay for first class or business class, somebody should deliver on it--or don't do it.
Germain: Air Canada has spent so much time focusing on the executive frequent flier--and it's a natural thing to appeal to your most frequent customers--but the fact is, when you go on the plane there is a ton of people who just fly two or three times a year. They are the bread and butter.
Keresteci: They can't win in the low-price game, but they can win in the best-value game. What they should do is simplify their offering and get into the better-value game, which is a combination of a good price and a good customer experience. They've poorly managed our expectations for years. They are in the gutter now, so they have to fix the experience.
Prouk: Have you been on Tango?
Germain: Tango's not even an airline anymore--it's a price point.
Prouk: Whatever Tango is, in spite of what they say about having a separate management, everything Air Canada does they will tar with that same brush of hubris, arrogance and unimagination. It's a cattle car. I'm not sure if anything can be done with this mess, but I do know that it is a very systemic problem. It's not, "Let's give the account to someone and do a few more ads." That's a joke.
Keresteci: This isn't about briefing an agency and telling everybody, "We're great at customer experience." You have to do it first.
Prouk: They have bad consumer DNA, and it will infect everything they do until they make massive changes.
Germain: There is a reservoir of trust there. That's why I believe Air Canada can overcome this. They have to develop their core brand values, and they have to be instinctively carried through by everybody in the company.
Keresteci: One of the things that needs to be regained or reinforced is trust. Trust between us and them, but, more importantly, trust between the employees and management. These employees will follow a true leader. Do they have a true leader in Robert Milton? I don't know.
Germain: The CEO has to buy in. The guy in the plant's more likely to buy in than the CEO. Businesses are not models of management anymore. Businesses are the brand. The brand is the business of Air Canada. Air Canada is in an unusual position in that it has almost every Canadian as a stakeholder. For some reason, we attach ourselves to our airlines.
Prouk: I'm not a stakeholder of Air Canada.
Keresteci: The Canadian angle of Air Canada.
Prouk: No. It has nothing to do with being Canadian.
Germain: Unfortunately, airlines have always been attached to our cultural identity. And that's a challenge. Changing the brand values will take some time. I mean, Air Canada will have to become not an airline, but an experience. What is it that makes people want to fly with that airline? Virgin Atlantic Airways is an amazing story because Richard Branson started with just one leased aircraft. What's wonderful about that kind of brand extension--he is able to go into different categories easily; he's created an experience related to the Virgin brand. Virgin stands for a tremendous amount of freedom and self-esteem, so you can almost put that in anything.
Prouk: When Richard Branson stands up on a stage and says whatever he says about the airline, when Steve Jobs stands up and holds up an iPod--there's no one else that can hold up an iPod that's going to change how you listen to music. When Mr. Milton stands up with his commercials--he did these ads a few years ago making all these promises--look at him. He looks like a failed accountant.
Keresteci: You know, the first time Herb Kelleher, [the founder of Southwest Airlines], and [David Neeleman], the founder of JetBlue, worked the flight--you think that didn't spread through the staff like wild fire? Now they do it all the time. So maybe Robert Milton isn't the guy. You can't fake this--you have to feel this. These guys, Kelleher and Neeleman, feel like they aren't worthy to sit in the front of the plane and get served. They get up and they serve their customers. If the leadership at Air Canada felt that way, they'd go a long way to solving the problems.
Germain: Mr. Milton has a very difficult task for himself. He has some personal rebranding issues. I'm not convinced that he can do it, but I'm not convinced that he can't.
Prouk: I believe Air Canada has a culture of customer hostility, and always has. I'm a big believer that culture is--and this is a much-maligned word--trickle-down. The company has a culture of arrogance. I've worked for some amazing clients--Steve Jobs at Apple, Hugo Powell at Labatt--great cultures started by people and enforced tyrannically, in a good way, by those people. It's about the consumer experience. Everything else is academic unless someone can solve this problem of making the experience a really terrific thing. It all begins and ends there. The rest of it--who cares? Everybody has troubles. I'm tired of all the whining that Milton does. Lots of companies that are in trouble don't go to the public with their problems.
Keresteci: You have to talk the talk and walk the walk.
Prouk: You have to deliver. I think the "mission statement" was invented by John F. Kennedy with NASA. The single greatest mission statement I've ever heard was from Kennedy: Our mission is to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth. Holy cow. That said everything about the greatest endeavour in the history of mankind. Anything and everything that had to do with NASA, if it didn't comply with that statement, they didn't do it.
Keresteci: At Southwest, everything they do has to result in a positive customer experience. If it doesn't, they don't do it. Same thing.
Germain: I am not fond of mission statements. They're all the same. I mean, you could literally take mission statements from different companies, throw them up in the air and let them land wherever. They're not intuitive. What [Air Canada] should think about is developing their core brand values. Make sure that when they devise this sort of mantra, they can carry it out instinctively and that it generates an intuitive culture in the company. They don't have that right now. They're so damaged, but they will come out of it.
Keresteci: The Air Canada brand is picking up the phone in the call centre, the wait time, the ticket counter, the arrival at the gate. Employees are critical, because they are the face of the brand. Yeah, the seats, the meal and being on time count, but at the end of the day the customer experience starts and finishes with the people. Do you fire the coach or do you fire the players? In this case, you have to do some work with the coach.
Germain: But don't forget, Air Canada employs 33,000 people. It was 43,000 not long ago, until the cutbacks. So it's a big employer. And you get this sense from everybody that works there that they've been left behind. You have to take this team and you have to win them over again. You've got to get them to buy in.
Keresteci: Can they bridge the gap?
Germain: There are two issues. You have to define what the brand is going to be. And it cannot be something created by an ad agency or it cannot be an exercise in creativity. It has to be something that resonates deeply in the mind of consumers. The discovery process has to be very deep into the emotions of people and find out why people like Gary feel this way--
Prouk: What do you mean, "people like Gary"?
Germain: Oh, but there are people like Gary, people who are angry at Air Canada. The point is, it's not a creative process, something an agency could fix. You feel sometimes there's a degree of regimentation with an airline; it doesn't have to be like that. It can be pleasurable, fun. In fact, one of their fares is the "Fun" fare. Instead of calling it economy or low-class, they call it "Fun" fare. You know, they're trying.
Keresteci: Like, lighten up, guys. Lighten up and just focus on a couple brand pillars. Do what you do, but don't take yourself too seriously. If union and non-union got together, had a couple laughs, generated some trust...
Canadian Business: What about advertising?
Keresteci: Have you seen WestJet's ads? Taxi has just done some work for WestJet, and the ads are, basically, "We're not Air Canada." They talk about "you won't experience this, you won't experience that." If I'm WestJet, do I want to build an awareness of "My company is not Air Canada"? I don't know that that's the way to go.
Prouk: There's a time and a place for that. Unfortunately, we live in a country that prohibits us from doing comparative advertising. I did the Nabob ad where he smashes the Maxwell House. We destroyed General Foods, you know, a small company called Nabob.
Keresteci: I've been associated with Tetley for over 25 years. When they were No. 4 or No. 3, they acted like they were No. 1. They had the best products. Now they are the dominant tea. They are a shining example of acting like you're No. 1.
Germain: This whole No. 1, No. 2 thing is so stupid. The consumer doesn't care.
Keresteci: No, it's not the consumer so much. It's the organization.
Germain: But the obsession the organization has with this is a waste of time.
Keresteci: No, not for the staff. Not for the people who work there. They want to be proud to say, "We are winning."
Germain: They can be proud without knowing they're the world leader. The consumer doesn't know who the leader is. It's irrelevant. There's this presumption that's come from a few pundits in the last five or so years, that if you don't lead in a category, you're finished. You're talking about associating yourself with a few key words. And that is a driver for a brand.
Keresteci: But what are the key words at Air Canada?
Germain: I don't think they should have key words. I think they should have a mantra, a brand value. But I don't think they should say, "No. 1 airline."
Keresteci: When I said No. 1, I didn't mean to the consumer. It's internal. As an organization, they act like No. 1. Inside.
Germain: I think being first is an outcome; it's a result of your success.
Keresteci: If you get there because you're striving to be No. 1, what's wrong with that?
Germain: I don't think anyone should strive to be No. 1. They should strive to be the best they can be.
Keresteci: But with Air Canada, that's not realistic. They have to be No. 1, or it's a completely different company.
Germain: I think they have to be No. 1 in people's minds. Period. In their hearts, in their soul, and their spirit.
Keresteci: Isn't this a challenge that somebody will look at and say, "What a fantastic opportunity"? If given carte blanche, what a great opportunity.
Prouk: It's spectacular.
Keresteci: A long history, a brand that, frankly, a lot of Canadians have trusted? What a turnaround story.
Prouk: It is one of the great chances in Canadian business. My instincts are, they won't do that. Because that's not where they come from. They are bureaucrats.
Germain: To make an ad right now, or a campaign, whatever, hire an ad agency to say, "We're new, we're fresh," is a crock. You know what? The consumer is not stupid, won't buy it; it won't change their attitude. It will take some time. How long would it take to change a corporation like that, after what they've gone through? Probably at least a year. To go out with brand information in their advertising would be a waste of time right now because it would be like putting lipstick on a pig.
Prouk: Advertising is the least of anyone's concerns right now. Anyway, the work they've been doing for the last 10 years is garbage. I mean, it's the worst advertising I've ever seen. It's embarrassing.
Canadian Business: What can Air Canada do while it's trying to change its culture?
Keresteci: How about just a strategy of surprise and delight. When something occurs--let's say it's a delayed flight--customers get 500 points. Let's say it's noticing two people are on their honeymoon and upgrading them--surprise and delight. It's a series of frequent and varied events they can do as they build this brand. It's about being relaxed and saying, "You look like you've had a tough day, we've got some extra seats in the front. I may not be able to guarantee you'll get a business class meal, but..."
Germain: And that's very satisfying for an employee, to be empowered that way.
Keresteci: Absolutely. The employee is satisfied and the customer is satisfied. Because of the amount of interaction that happens between the customer and employees.
Germain: I would take advantage of the Internet. If you look at their website right now, it's very staid. Even Zip, which is supposed to compete with WestJet, is very sterile. They need to bring the experience to the web so customers can sense it, learn from it and get the information at will.
Keresteci: I'd like to see people asking me, How was my flight? And then doing something with my answer. They need small wins. They need some early victories to get some positive momentum. They don't have positive momentum, and negative momentum is very hard to stop.
Prouk: I would be very glad to see them present themselves as a private enterprise, not as a vestigial organ of the government. I want to know that I am dealing with a private enterprise that runs itself like a real company.
Keresteci: We'd be more empathetic to them. Start doing things that we aren't expecting. Surprise us every once in a while. Gary, you started off today with expectations being mauled over the years. You know what? It's easy to surpass my expectations now. The bar is so low.
Germain: And they need very good publicity. I think Canadians want Air Canada to succeed. Travel is a tough brand to be in right now.
Keresteci: Life is tough.
Our panel: Garo Keresteci, president of Fuse Marketing Group in Toronto, has 16 years' marketing experience. He developed the Cup Crazy promo for Labatt and conceived of round tea bags for Tetley. Gary Prouk, head of the Sebastian Consultancy in Toronto, is a 35-year marketing veteran. He created the campaign that made the making of Cadbury's Caramilk candy bar a secret. Marie Germain is the Brighton, Ont., head of Brand Revival, and has been a marketer since the 1980s. Her expertise is sought by companies like IBM and Pepsi.
© 2004 Rogers Media Inc.
Extreme Makeover-Air Canada Edition: How do you mend a broken brand?
by Andy Holloway, June 7, 2004
Tell someone an airplane horror story--delayed flight, rude service, lost luggage--and people are likely to assume it's about Air Canada. That's how far the beleaguered airline has sunk in the eyes of Canadians, who, in an exclusive survey conducted by Spencer Francey Peters and the Strategic Counsel, voted it the worst-managed brand in the country by a landslide. In fact, 46% of those surveyed said that of 157 companies, Air Canada stood out as the one with the most tarnished brand. (The next-lowest brands came in far behind, at 16%.) Canadians love to hate Air Canada even more than they do the banks and cellphone providers--two more traditional targets. Some might even be happy to see Air Canada permanently grounded.
Yet Air Canada is a well-recognized brand, and 10% of respondents actually felt it was the second-best-managed name in the travel and transportation sector (WestJet came first at 31%). So perhaps there's something worth saving here. But when--or if--the troubled airline emerges from bankruptcy protection, the hard work of winning back customers' hearts and minds will really begin. And it's clear that merely changing the name or painting the planes isn't going to be enough.
We called in a top-notch marketing, branding and advertising team--Garo Keresteci of Fuse Marketing Group in Toronto, Marie Germain, the Brighton, Ont., head of Brand Revival, and Gary Prouk of Sebastian Consultancy in Toronto--to brainstorm ideas for getting Air Canada off the runway. Here are their prescriptions for an extreme makeover of Canada's ugliest brand.
Canadian Business: Let's assume Air Canada has its financial house in order and has money to spend. It wants to start regaining consumer trust and loyalty. How?
Keresteci: The first day this deal is done, they should get up and say, "This is the problem we got ourselves into, here's what we're going to do about it, and here's how to give us feedback." And they should act on that feedback on a real-time basis. But they have to be transparent about their fares and about how they do business with all their stakeholders, including their employees. And they have not been transparent.
Germain: They made a lot of mistakes with their fares. They did some marketing with their fares without including the taxes or one-way and so on. But what company isn't guilty of doing that to some extent, to endear the public to their price point? It's a waste of time, though, because a brand isn't built on a price. I think price is the opposite of a brand. People are willing to pay more, always, for a very special experience.
Prouk: They've been sodomizing expectations for so long. It's been endemic with Air Canada for the past 30 years. You can't rape those people who are paying for first or business class, and then open it up to the world [with free upgrades]. There has to be a distinction.It's like two-tier medicine. If you pay for first class or business class, somebody should deliver on it--or don't do it.
Germain: Air Canada has spent so much time focusing on the executive frequent flier--and it's a natural thing to appeal to your most frequent customers--but the fact is, when you go on the plane there is a ton of people who just fly two or three times a year. They are the bread and butter.
Keresteci: They can't win in the low-price game, but they can win in the best-value game. What they should do is simplify their offering and get into the better-value game, which is a combination of a good price and a good customer experience. They've poorly managed our expectations for years. They are in the gutter now, so they have to fix the experience.
Prouk: Have you been on Tango?
Germain: Tango's not even an airline anymore--it's a price point.
Prouk: Whatever Tango is, in spite of what they say about having a separate management, everything Air Canada does they will tar with that same brush of hubris, arrogance and unimagination. It's a cattle car. I'm not sure if anything can be done with this mess, but I do know that it is a very systemic problem. It's not, "Let's give the account to someone and do a few more ads." That's a joke.
Keresteci: This isn't about briefing an agency and telling everybody, "We're great at customer experience." You have to do it first.
Prouk: They have bad consumer DNA, and it will infect everything they do until they make massive changes.
Germain: There is a reservoir of trust there. That's why I believe Air Canada can overcome this. They have to develop their core brand values, and they have to be instinctively carried through by everybody in the company.
Keresteci: One of the things that needs to be regained or reinforced is trust. Trust between us and them, but, more importantly, trust between the employees and management. These employees will follow a true leader. Do they have a true leader in Robert Milton? I don't know.
Germain: The CEO has to buy in. The guy in the plant's more likely to buy in than the CEO. Businesses are not models of management anymore. Businesses are the brand. The brand is the business of Air Canada. Air Canada is in an unusual position in that it has almost every Canadian as a stakeholder. For some reason, we attach ourselves to our airlines.
Prouk: I'm not a stakeholder of Air Canada.
Keresteci: The Canadian angle of Air Canada.
Prouk: No. It has nothing to do with being Canadian.
Germain: Unfortunately, airlines have always been attached to our cultural identity. And that's a challenge. Changing the brand values will take some time. I mean, Air Canada will have to become not an airline, but an experience. What is it that makes people want to fly with that airline? Virgin Atlantic Airways is an amazing story because Richard Branson started with just one leased aircraft. What's wonderful about that kind of brand extension--he is able to go into different categories easily; he's created an experience related to the Virgin brand. Virgin stands for a tremendous amount of freedom and self-esteem, so you can almost put that in anything.
Prouk: When Richard Branson stands up on a stage and says whatever he says about the airline, when Steve Jobs stands up and holds up an iPod--there's no one else that can hold up an iPod that's going to change how you listen to music. When Mr. Milton stands up with his commercials--he did these ads a few years ago making all these promises--look at him. He looks like a failed accountant.
Keresteci: You know, the first time Herb Kelleher, [the founder of Southwest Airlines], and [David Neeleman], the founder of JetBlue, worked the flight--you think that didn't spread through the staff like wild fire? Now they do it all the time. So maybe Robert Milton isn't the guy. You can't fake this--you have to feel this. These guys, Kelleher and Neeleman, feel like they aren't worthy to sit in the front of the plane and get served. They get up and they serve their customers. If the leadership at Air Canada felt that way, they'd go a long way to solving the problems.
Germain: Mr. Milton has a very difficult task for himself. He has some personal rebranding issues. I'm not convinced that he can do it, but I'm not convinced that he can't.
Prouk: I believe Air Canada has a culture of customer hostility, and always has. I'm a big believer that culture is--and this is a much-maligned word--trickle-down. The company has a culture of arrogance. I've worked for some amazing clients--Steve Jobs at Apple, Hugo Powell at Labatt--great cultures started by people and enforced tyrannically, in a good way, by those people. It's about the consumer experience. Everything else is academic unless someone can solve this problem of making the experience a really terrific thing. It all begins and ends there. The rest of it--who cares? Everybody has troubles. I'm tired of all the whining that Milton does. Lots of companies that are in trouble don't go to the public with their problems.
Keresteci: You have to talk the talk and walk the walk.
Prouk: You have to deliver. I think the "mission statement" was invented by John F. Kennedy with NASA. The single greatest mission statement I've ever heard was from Kennedy: Our mission is to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth. Holy cow. That said everything about the greatest endeavour in the history of mankind. Anything and everything that had to do with NASA, if it didn't comply with that statement, they didn't do it.
Keresteci: At Southwest, everything they do has to result in a positive customer experience. If it doesn't, they don't do it. Same thing.
Germain: I am not fond of mission statements. They're all the same. I mean, you could literally take mission statements from different companies, throw them up in the air and let them land wherever. They're not intuitive. What [Air Canada] should think about is developing their core brand values. Make sure that when they devise this sort of mantra, they can carry it out instinctively and that it generates an intuitive culture in the company. They don't have that right now. They're so damaged, but they will come out of it.
Keresteci: The Air Canada brand is picking up the phone in the call centre, the wait time, the ticket counter, the arrival at the gate. Employees are critical, because they are the face of the brand. Yeah, the seats, the meal and being on time count, but at the end of the day the customer experience starts and finishes with the people. Do you fire the coach or do you fire the players? In this case, you have to do some work with the coach.
Germain: But don't forget, Air Canada employs 33,000 people. It was 43,000 not long ago, until the cutbacks. So it's a big employer. And you get this sense from everybody that works there that they've been left behind. You have to take this team and you have to win them over again. You've got to get them to buy in.
Keresteci: Can they bridge the gap?
Germain: There are two issues. You have to define what the brand is going to be. And it cannot be something created by an ad agency or it cannot be an exercise in creativity. It has to be something that resonates deeply in the mind of consumers. The discovery process has to be very deep into the emotions of people and find out why people like Gary feel this way--
Prouk: What do you mean, "people like Gary"?
Germain: Oh, but there are people like Gary, people who are angry at Air Canada. The point is, it's not a creative process, something an agency could fix. You feel sometimes there's a degree of regimentation with an airline; it doesn't have to be like that. It can be pleasurable, fun. In fact, one of their fares is the "Fun" fare. Instead of calling it economy or low-class, they call it "Fun" fare. You know, they're trying.
Keresteci: Like, lighten up, guys. Lighten up and just focus on a couple brand pillars. Do what you do, but don't take yourself too seriously. If union and non-union got together, had a couple laughs, generated some trust...
Canadian Business: What about advertising?
Keresteci: Have you seen WestJet's ads? Taxi has just done some work for WestJet, and the ads are, basically, "We're not Air Canada." They talk about "you won't experience this, you won't experience that." If I'm WestJet, do I want to build an awareness of "My company is not Air Canada"? I don't know that that's the way to go.
Prouk: There's a time and a place for that. Unfortunately, we live in a country that prohibits us from doing comparative advertising. I did the Nabob ad where he smashes the Maxwell House. We destroyed General Foods, you know, a small company called Nabob.
Keresteci: I've been associated with Tetley for over 25 years. When they were No. 4 or No. 3, they acted like they were No. 1. They had the best products. Now they are the dominant tea. They are a shining example of acting like you're No. 1.
Germain: This whole No. 1, No. 2 thing is so stupid. The consumer doesn't care.
Keresteci: No, it's not the consumer so much. It's the organization.
Germain: But the obsession the organization has with this is a waste of time.
Keresteci: No, not for the staff. Not for the people who work there. They want to be proud to say, "We are winning."
Germain: They can be proud without knowing they're the world leader. The consumer doesn't know who the leader is. It's irrelevant. There's this presumption that's come from a few pundits in the last five or so years, that if you don't lead in a category, you're finished. You're talking about associating yourself with a few key words. And that is a driver for a brand.
Keresteci: But what are the key words at Air Canada?
Germain: I don't think they should have key words. I think they should have a mantra, a brand value. But I don't think they should say, "No. 1 airline."
Keresteci: When I said No. 1, I didn't mean to the consumer. It's internal. As an organization, they act like No. 1. Inside.
Germain: I think being first is an outcome; it's a result of your success.
Keresteci: If you get there because you're striving to be No. 1, what's wrong with that?
Germain: I don't think anyone should strive to be No. 1. They should strive to be the best they can be.
Keresteci: But with Air Canada, that's not realistic. They have to be No. 1, or it's a completely different company.
Germain: I think they have to be No. 1 in people's minds. Period. In their hearts, in their soul, and their spirit.
Keresteci: Isn't this a challenge that somebody will look at and say, "What a fantastic opportunity"? If given carte blanche, what a great opportunity.
Prouk: It's spectacular.
Keresteci: A long history, a brand that, frankly, a lot of Canadians have trusted? What a turnaround story.
Prouk: It is one of the great chances in Canadian business. My instincts are, they won't do that. Because that's not where they come from. They are bureaucrats.
Germain: To make an ad right now, or a campaign, whatever, hire an ad agency to say, "We're new, we're fresh," is a crock. You know what? The consumer is not stupid, won't buy it; it won't change their attitude. It will take some time. How long would it take to change a corporation like that, after what they've gone through? Probably at least a year. To go out with brand information in their advertising would be a waste of time right now because it would be like putting lipstick on a pig.
Prouk: Advertising is the least of anyone's concerns right now. Anyway, the work they've been doing for the last 10 years is garbage. I mean, it's the worst advertising I've ever seen. It's embarrassing.
Canadian Business: What can Air Canada do while it's trying to change its culture?
Keresteci: How about just a strategy of surprise and delight. When something occurs--let's say it's a delayed flight--customers get 500 points. Let's say it's noticing two people are on their honeymoon and upgrading them--surprise and delight. It's a series of frequent and varied events they can do as they build this brand. It's about being relaxed and saying, "You look like you've had a tough day, we've got some extra seats in the front. I may not be able to guarantee you'll get a business class meal, but..."
Germain: And that's very satisfying for an employee, to be empowered that way.
Keresteci: Absolutely. The employee is satisfied and the customer is satisfied. Because of the amount of interaction that happens between the customer and employees.
Germain: I would take advantage of the Internet. If you look at their website right now, it's very staid. Even Zip, which is supposed to compete with WestJet, is very sterile. They need to bring the experience to the web so customers can sense it, learn from it and get the information at will.
Keresteci: I'd like to see people asking me, How was my flight? And then doing something with my answer. They need small wins. They need some early victories to get some positive momentum. They don't have positive momentum, and negative momentum is very hard to stop.
Prouk: I would be very glad to see them present themselves as a private enterprise, not as a vestigial organ of the government. I want to know that I am dealing with a private enterprise that runs itself like a real company.
Keresteci: We'd be more empathetic to them. Start doing things that we aren't expecting. Surprise us every once in a while. Gary, you started off today with expectations being mauled over the years. You know what? It's easy to surpass my expectations now. The bar is so low.
Germain: And they need very good publicity. I think Canadians want Air Canada to succeed. Travel is a tough brand to be in right now.
Keresteci: Life is tough.
Our panel: Garo Keresteci, president of Fuse Marketing Group in Toronto, has 16 years' marketing experience. He developed the Cup Crazy promo for Labatt and conceived of round tea bags for Tetley. Gary Prouk, head of the Sebastian Consultancy in Toronto, is a 35-year marketing veteran. He created the campaign that made the making of Cadbury's Caramilk candy bar a secret. Marie Germain is the Brighton, Ont., head of Brand Revival, and has been a marketer since the 1980s. Her expertise is sought by companies like IBM and Pepsi.
© 2004 Rogers Media Inc.
