Virgin Australia has just handed its head of brand and marketing the new title of chief customer officer. Paul McIntyre talks to Mark Hassell to see what it all means.
About four weeks ago Mark Hassell was Virgin Australia’s still relatively new head of brand and marketing, but as part of chief executive John Borghetti’s complete overhaul and rebrand of the airline 16 months ago he has now been tasked with additional responsibility for ‘the customer’.
The idea for Virgin is to align the airline’s brand, marketing and customer service more closely for a renewed offensive against rival Qantas. It’s a job function which will become increasingly common among Australian brands as their corporate owners endeavour to ‘walk the talk’ between their communications and brand vision and consistently deliver to their customer base and prospects.
Borghetti, the former chief financial officer at Qantas before being overlooked for the chief executive role in favour of current Qantas boss Alan Joyce, has clearly watched his old Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon. Dixon was a former marketer who in the top job took a keen and ongoing interest in the airline’s brand and communications efforts. There are already plenty of stories of Borghetti rewriting advertising headlines and taglines for Virgin and throwing himself with great enthusiasm at the project to revamp Virgin’s livery, which was launched last year.
Hassell declares unprompted on several occasions that “John is a great marketer”.
It was certainly Borghetti’s design to re-engineer Hassell’s role to chief customer officer as part of his ‘Game Change’ program to reposition Virgin into a full-service airline. With Qantas now out spruiking a renewed commitment to a service culture and customer care, last weekend saw Virgin launch its own advertising counter-offensive through Clemenger BBDO Sydney. Hassell says there is more to come.
“Why now? We needed to,” he explains. “The time is right for us to go out with another big brand campaign because when we look at the ‘Game Change’ program John put in place a couple of years ago, we’re ahead of the curve of where we want to be. We set ourselves an ambitious target to get a different mix of customers – more corporate and business customers – and we’re a year ahead.
“People are giving us a go. We know from a choice and preference perspective people are not only giving us a go, they’re coming back. They’re liking what they’re seeing so it felt to us the time was right to say look, the product and service overhaul that we’ve done is pretty phenomenal in 18 months and we need to go out and tell people that.”
Hassell’s claims are backed up by some fairly compelling data.
Virgin is 12 months ahead of schedule with its stated ambition to generate 20% of revenue from the business and government sector. According to AMR’s 2012 Corporate Reputation Index, Virgin Australia jumped from 13th to sixth place overall while Qantas slumped 28 places overall from 7th in 2011 to 25th this year.
“It’s a young brand,” Hassell says. “Virgin Australia is 16 months old so we’ve got to keep getting the message across that we are different but packaged up very tangibly as to why we’re different. So this isn’t just a paint job.”
Hassell says now that there is brand awareness that Virgin is a full-service airline with business class seats, airport lounges, a new look and a global partner alliance network, the key challenge is to focus on the culture and the staff so that the customer experience keeps improving.
“What I want is to take our people from being great to being more outstanding and to do that now because [our competitors] already can’t match us,” he says. “And they definitely won’t when we go further along the direction we are going. So increasingly for me there is a product story in aviation and there’s a service story in aviation and you’ve got to be great at both if you’re going to be outstanding.”
Chief customer who?
There’s not a lot of precedent for Mark Hassell’s new role as Virgin Australia’s chief customer officer but clearly one of the marketer’s mandates is leading the airline’s plans to be a more customer-centric company along with his usual tasks of brand and marketing.
“The role is very much to help reposition the company internally around brand and culture,” he says. “It’s a great job in the sense that I’ve got end-to-end customer experience responsibility and I’ve got the marketing folks sitting together. There are not a lot of turf wars here. In fact, I really don’t think I’ve seen them. The critical thing about that is I would say [chief executive John Borghetti] is ahuge customer champion and an experienced marketer in a number of ways. So from his perspective it is crystal clear that moving the company forward needs to have the customer and the brand at the heart of everything we do. The decisions we’re making, the strategic direction we want to go is around that understanding that the customer is in the middle of it. It’s working very, very well.
“What we want to do now is spend more time with our people, developing their skills even further. We’ve got an integrated training program that’s going to take our service to the next level. The journey Virgin has been on is very quick and we want everybody now to feel more comfortable that we’re spending time on the finer skills and giving them greater confidence as our mix of customers change. Our people are just infectious. The team wants to be there. They look great and you can see there’s a pride that radiates. What I don’t see is a disengaged group. I don’t see a group of people who don’t want to be there.”
This article first appeared in the 5 October 2012 edition of AdNews.
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