The role of Marketing during & post pandemic

Finally managed some time to put down the excepts from the panel I was on in the CMO Insights, Aviation Festival Asia 2021.

?The topic is on the role of marketing in this pandemic, especially on

• How can marketing help rebuild trust in travel post pandemic?
• How do you intend to differentiate post-pandemic?
• What are the lessons from previous crises that we can apply to the brand moving forward?

Was not able to excerpt everything due to the length of it, but do watch the video for the invaluable insights from the other panelist too, alongside Siddhartha Butalia (CMO, Air Asia India), Akira Mitsumasu (Vice President, Global Marketing, Japan Airlines), Andrew Ward (VP, Marketing & Customer Experience, Jazeera Airways), and moderated by Shashank Nigam (CEO, SimpliFlying). Link here: https://youtu.be/gwZVHCNqLp8

Shashank Nigam: What is the role of marketing in helping rebuild trust post pandemic?

Eric Thain: I think the focus marketing has definitely shifted but I’d also like to make the point that the basics of marketing, the holy grail of marketing does not change. It's always about the customer, it’s about connecting with them. And about rebuilding trust, I think there are many ways but I don't think that it's something that you do post COVID. It is something that we need to do now. Trust needs time to build, it's not something that should wait till travel resumes. Do it now. There are many ways to do that. And for the purposes of today, I'm just going to talk about three that we at HK Express put a lot of focus on.

Number one is being Present to the Consumer. And secondly, it's about putting the customer first. And thirdly is about engaging with the consumer. And in the midst of doing all that, we are really looking at the whole customer journey and our models to determine what actually matters to them at this point in time. In that regard, we closely monitor and we are being very flexible in terms of refining our approaches and our media mix according to their media behavior.

Be present to the Customer and put the Customer first. And in the midst of doing all that, we are really looking at the whole customer journey and our models to determine what actually matters to them at this point in time.

So let me just talk about putting customer first. We know that customers have a lot of worries at this point in time. A lot of things that we've done is in order to to curb that, for example, hygiene measures. I think all airlines have done that. We've also done that very early on more than a year ago when COVID started. The vaccination drive is in full gear at the moment, which we themed “Stronger Together: it's up to us, the time is now!” to get these vaccination rates up so that the borders can open and we can travel. We had our first set of fully vaccinated crew operated a flight to and from Taichung about a couple of months ago. We also experimented with a travel passport to pave the way on borders opening again. Early on as well, we've started to offer complimentary COVID travel insurance to our customers. From a longer term point of view, we also exploring a touchless journey for where consumers are traveling.

The second point in putting the customer first is on customer care and is something that we focus on a lot when COVID started. For us it's about giving our customers options and flexibility in the flight changes. When this whole thing started, there were a lot of heated emotions from consumers on whether they are getting their money back and how fast they are getting their money back, when can they can travel under all those uncertainties. So we focus a lot of making sure that we are being present to them in our customer care channels. And I'm happy to say that this has also resulted in positive sentiments, especially on our social that we all know is a very difficult battleground for airlines where right now there are a lot of emotions on social. I think we've managed to have built good resilience for the brand throughout this whole period. And in fact, we've even seen some advocates stood up for the brand during this time. Another point about customers care is that we have introduced a lot of new communication channels for our customers to get in touch with us anytime they want to. In addition to this omni channel experience, from a longer term point of view, we are also in the midst of adopting new technologies to drive the evolution of customer service.

Let's talk a little bit about engagement because I think in terms of marketing and brand building, engagement is very important. This is not anything new in modern marketing. But now, the focus is listening and connecting. And I mean really listening and getting into what is important to consumer. In order to do that, there's a couple of things. Firstly, we want to connect. In order to do that, we are generating content around the consumers interest points. Now this is getting very difficult because over the 500 or more days during the pandemic, we've noticed travel content fatigue. There's only so many times one can talk about “Do you remember travel?” Consumers are already sick of hearing that and not being able to travel. So the key here is to to inject excitement in this long time of travel starvation. For example, we put our decommissioned trolleys on sale several months ago which got really good traction & engagement, where people can actually buy a taste of travel. We did a live streaming during Sakura season one half months ago with an influencer from Hong Kong. And as my CEO Mandy mentioned in the earlier session, we've also done a lot in terms of making ‘Taste of Travel’ videos in Hong Kong, reminding people that hey, we know you can't travel at the moment but you can find a taste of Thailand in Hong Kong as well or you can find some great Japanese restaurants and stuff to see in Hong Kong too.

So, I'm just going to close on this very quickly. I think marketing is only the beginning of this relationship with our consumer. I think that marketing must be viewed in the context of this whole, full end to end journey and work to connect all these dots. Marketing is the key leader of this customer journey and the voice of the consumer. So throughout, we definitely have a very strong role to play in terms of not only building but maintaining the trust of the consumer for when travel resumes, which we know is going to be very gradual.

Shashank Nigam: I really appreciate you Eric, diving a little deeper into some of those points. I love the fact that you said marketing is the voice of the consumer. More importantly, I like the point about being present during COVID & don't wait till things for restarting. It's very important to build trust now. But once that's done, how do you ensure that your brand is the preferred brand? How do you differentiate your brand post pandemic?

Eric Thain: Definitely. Well, as we all know, recovery will be very gradual. When COVID hit, digital transformation accelerated overnight. Most companies are making sure that we are closer to the customer in terms of knowing what they need in terms of personalization with data analytics. I'm pretty sure the situation is similar with most airlines. So the result of this is the customer expectation ?post COVID will have skyrocketed overnight, expecting a hyper personalized experience. So I think brands and companies / airlines need to be ready for this. Right now is the time to build the right data and tech foundation in order to be prepared. And we've been doing a lot of these throughout most of our customer touchpoints, our direct channels, our customer care touchpoints and so on. Closer to marketing, I think the crisis has resulted in the need for marketing agility to pivot according to the moment. This means really faster decision making; being flexible across our creative; our content (things will change within a moment's notice about our messaging); even our budgeting which is obviously a big constraint in terms of how much we can spend in order to get the engagement where we require; the channels that we go out to reach the consumers; as well as the media that we engage. So I think that the tools at our disposal at this point in time is very few compared to pre-COVID. And I will say the same thing: do not wait until post pandemic. This is an ongoing exercise and again, be present. Now build trust now and extend this into post pandemic, and use all the existing tools that you have in your disposal to connect with the consumers. Another point & the most efficient way to do things is to rally the partners. We are all in this together in the travel industry. We are very close to the prefectural governments and Tourism Boards in Japan & in Thailand. Everyone is raring to see travel opening up again so we engage with them much more than ever in terms of getting the content and messaging out to our customers, which is their consumers too.

The need for marketing agility to pivot according to the moment.

Shashank Nigam: What is the one lesson from past crisis that you've taken in?

Eric Thain: Yeah, I definitely agree that there is nothing similar that we have met in the past like COVID, mainly due to the length of it. Even SARS before was a rebound of 3 to 5 months. Already, we are going into one and a half, two years now on a global scale. But if there's one thing I like to share, and this is also from my past experience in FMCG and retail as well, is don’t dwell on the past, moved the brand forward. Because past crisis have shown that brands that connect well with consumers emerge much stronger, and again, its about being present. Marketing plays a vitally crucial role in this crisis on customer engagement under the need to refocus pivot and staying agile, so I think that's a very, very good reason we're all keeping very busy as we see the light at the end of the tunnel. At the end of the day, take care of your customers and they will stick with you, they will remember it. People like to remember the positive things, so when this crisis is over they will remember that this brand has done something positive for me in the past. I end this with the Chinese saying, every crisis is an opportunity, so we just have to adapt to the changing consumer need. And to be honest with you, I don't think we have any other choice. Right? We just need to get on with it.