Whatever you think of the British Airways ad, for God’s sake don’t mention the War!

September 23, 2011

 

Long awaited; now we’ve seen it: BA’s first major corporate advertising campaign in over a decade.

It represents a litmus test moment for agency BBH which, frustratingly, has had to battle through years of turbulence, in the form of industrial unrest, corporate mismanagement and radical restructuring, not to mention volcanic ash-cloud and a recession, before being allowed to do its first major work since wresting the account from M&C Saatchi in 2005.

But what do we – the viewers, the BA audience – think of it? Does it magnify the brand, or is it simply grandiloquent? Does it, in sum, hit the right note?

To my mind, the 90 second ad rumbles along the runway well enough but fails to reach the soaring heights to which it aspires. True, it’s beautifully shot with what appears to be loving attention to period detail. And it’s hard not to be touched by the romance and heroic derring-do of early civil aviation that underpins this hommage to BA’s corporate history. Then there’s all that gleaming, nostalgic aerial technology: the primitive, wind-in-your-hair De Havilland DH-9; the elegant Dragon Rapide; that rugged warhorse the DC3; the once-ubiquitous VC-10, as we move into the age of jet propulsion (though not – I note – the more innovative and earlier Comet, with its unfortunate tendency to metal fatigue in mid-flight); and on through the sound-barrrier with the space-age Concorde, the fastest airliner ever built.

Stirring stuff. But here the epic narrative plunges into bathos, with the appearance of BA’s contemporary fleet of 747s – utilitarian, safe and (relatively) economic no doubt, but hardly the epitome of legend. Indeed, the ad’s closing sequence merely reminds us that the transcendent feature of modern-day civil aviation is its banality. Today’s pilots may be terribly well trained and reliable but, in an age of advanced avionics and autopilots, the risks they run hardly bear comparison with those of their intrepid predecessors.

That is not my only criticism, however. If you’re going to do a nostalgic commercial, make sure it’s glamorous rather than merely portentous. Virgin Airlines knew exactly what it was about with its 25th birthday tribute (crafted by RKC&R/Y&R) 2 years ago; it’s shallow, showy bling, but none the worse for that in imparting a sense of credible excitement.

With the BA ad, by contrast, we’re in trouble almost from the beginning with that overwrought voiceover addressing its paean to the heroic pilot qualities of a bygone age.

And then – and this is the corker – there’s that extraordinary catchline – To Fly To Serve; a motto, we’re told, pinned to the chest of every serving BA captain. Close your eyes, and you can imagine Guy Gibson touching down in his Lancaster after destroying the Möhne Dam. Actually, I’m not joking. “To Fly To Serve” is the English translation of Volamus Ut Serviamus, the motto of 691 Squadron – which was formed on December 1st 1943 with a brief to provide the Royal Navy with aerial training targets around the Plymouth area.

Unfortunate coincidence? Someone not done their homework properly? Probably. But also a subliminal clue that most national carriers (so I’m informed) are military in origin. BA, for instance, is a lineal descendant of Aircraft Transport & Travel (just glimpsed at the beginning of the ad), which was set up during WW1 with a fleet of former military aircraft. Not, I imagine, an aspect of BA’s heritage that its management would care to dwell on.

It would be no surprise to find this particular ad line experiencing a rapid upgrade.

About these ads

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British Airways’ not very Bright move

February 16, 2011

Mystery surrounds, as they say, the unanticipated departure of Kerris Bright, BA’s head of global marketing – which hit the news last week.

Bright lives up to her name. She is a marketing luminary, a Fellow of the Marketing Society, and highly placed in those “power leagues” that do the rounds (usually not far off Aviva’s Amanda Mackenzie in ranking). BA spent about a year head-hunting her after her predecessor – head of marketing communications Katherine Whitton – took voluntary redundancy in 2008.

All to little avail. Though Bright signed up for the BA job about a year ago, she in fact joined in June. So she has served little more than 6 months before handing her notice in.

Ostensibly, she had had an offer she could not refuse from her former boss at ICI, David Hamill, whom she describes as “the most inspirational person” she has ever worked for. Hamill is now chairman and chief executive officer of Ideal Standard International, the bathroom fixtures company. The job he was offering her? Chief marketing officer and a team role in spearheading ISI’s international expansion.

Ideal Standard, the formerly British brand, is now part of an international consortium – mainly financed by private equity specialist Bain Capital Partners – with a focus on Europe and the Middle East. No doubt Bright has been lined up for a cut of the PE action over time – enticement in itself, it could be argued. And no doubt Hamill is every bit as charismatic as he sounds. Nevertheless, the abrupt U-turn in her career aspirations has set tongues wagging about her “real”motives for leaving BA. After all, try as you might to juxtapose Ideal Standard as a brand (under-rated, as it happens) with BA, however degraded it has become, and something doesn’t stack up.

The missing ingredient is called Frank van der Post. Van der Post, formerly chief operating officer of hotel group Jumeriah, was parachuted in last December to fill the new and senior role of BA managing director brands and customer experience. His appointment was part of a top-echelon management reshuffle as BA limbered up for its merger with Iberia, as a result of which BA chief Willie Walsh got to run the new holding company, International Airlines Group.

The important point to note here is that Bright’s immediate boss, sales and marketing director Andy Crawley, was boosted to an executive boardroom role at BA as commercial director with “particular responsibility for exploiting the revenue opportunities” arising from the near £6bn merger. He is no longer BA specific. And what did Bright get out of all this? Very little, except perhaps a smack in the face.

Not only had she not received a promotion herself, she had a new boss, van der Post, whose experience of brand strategy is arguably inferior to her own. All right, he is hugely experienced in the other area of his remit, customer relations. But so he should be, with over 25 years in the hotel business – most of it spent at Intercontinental Hotels Group. With all due respect to the Flying Dutchman, I doubt that he has ever achieved a branding success that bears comparison with Bright’s work for Dulux at ICI then AkzoNobel.

In sum, Bright had been “restructured” out of the strategic part of her role, but left with the less interesting tactical stuff (like dealing with agencies). Not, I imagine, what she thought she had been brought in to do.

Of course, a mitigating case could be made for BA’s behaviour. The chronic industrial unrest that continues to plague it makes the appointment of an experienced customer relations expert a great deal more of a priority than that of a first-class brand strategist. It’s difficult to launch a meaningful corporate brand campaign when so much of BA’s recent past is tainted with the memory of the Terminal 5 fiasco, and so much of its future with the possibility of paralysing industrial action. Furthermore – and I do not know the answer to this – it may be that Bright is more comfortable working with product rather than service brands (check her CV).

All the same, it looks as if BA has made a prime cock-up over the handling of Bright. Now, why does that not surprise me? I wonder how long the company will take to recruit her successor.

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Domino’s Pizza makes a crust from eating humble pie

June 1, 2010

Does brutal honesty with the customer ever pay off? It does, if Domino’s Pizza is anything to go by.

Tired of being the butt of popular jokes about the lamentable quality of its ingredients, Domino’s decided to introduce a fully fledged overhaul of its product late last year. As even the most junior student of marketing – citing Coca-Cola – will tell you, changing the recipe is one of the most dangerous expedients a marketer can embark upon.

Not content with this, however, Domino’s upped the ante against itself by fanfaring its pizza relaunch with an advertising campaign that rubbished the company’s previous product quality. The “We stink” campaign admitted the old crust tasted like cardboard and the sauce like ketchup; and that its staff were fed up with customers trashing the food.

Now for the first time we can judge the results. In the first quarter of this year, US sales at stores open for more than a year soared an astonishing 14.3%. Not exactly a new-Coke style disaster. Actually, as Domino’s chief marketing officer Russell Weiner pointed out to BNET some months ago, the Coke parallel is a bit misleading. Domino’s has never been successful on account of its taste. The core brand values are in fact convenience, low price and reliability. Even so, the brand communications strategy was clearly a risk.

So far the campaign has run exclusively in the USA, where its mood has provided a nice counterpoint to the singular lack of Wall street contrition over Main Street fall-out from the world financial crisis. A little humility, it seems, can play remarkably well.

We have yet to discover whether the new marcoms formula is for export. There certainly seems scope for applying it to other troubled brands. The Chicago Tribune suggests BP could retrieve a smidgin of its reputation from eating humble pie. Judging from today’s plunging share price, it may be too late for such remedies. Maybe BA’s not too far gone to profit, though. It should run a campaign this autumn along the lines of: “We know you know. Up to now, we’ve been rubbish…”

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Martin George: guilty until proven innocent

May 11, 2010

With one farce playing on at Whitehall, it’s easy to overlook another at Southwark Crown Court that flopped almost instantly.

“Ludicrous”, “disgraceful”, “shabby”, “cynical” were  some of the kinder epiphets being showered upon it by the critics – most of them in the legal profession. Yes, I’m talking about the Office of Fair Trading’s case against four BA executives for alleged price-fixing. After four years of painstaking preparation, the trial collapsed before a single witness took the stand; inexplicably, the prosecution had sat upon email evidence that immediately exonerated the defendants from any suggestion of conspiracy.

No doubt heads should roll – those of John Fingleton at the OFT and Steve Ridgway at Virgin Atlantic come to mind; yet it is the heads already lying in the blood-stained sawdust which are my main concern here. And one in particular, that of Martin George, formerly commercial director of BA: judged guilty before he was proved innocent.

There was a time when reputations in marketing didn’t come any higher than George’s. The mild-mannered, aimiable executive constantly topped surveys of the great and good in marketing. And rightly so. He was, after all, in charge of one our most vibrant brands (I’m talking about quite a few years ago) and was one of the few marketing directors who had made it onto the board of an FTSE 100 company. Capping it all, he looked chief executive material. Only narrowly was he pipped to the top post at BA by former pilot Willie Walsh in 2005.

But it was downhill fast after that. Once details began to emerge the following year of an alleged conspiracy to fix aviation fuel price surcharges – thanks to Virgin turning whistleblower – George was barely able to hold down a proper job. Who would, with maybe a five-year prison sentence hanging over them? Hounded out of BA later that year, he applied unsuccessfully for the Manchester United commercial role (filled, briefly, by ex-Saatchi ceo Lee Daley) and has since had to content himself with the role of interim group marketing director at BUPA (where he still is), and whatever below-the-radar consultancy tasks have come his way. Nothing, I imagine, within the range of the £450,000 or so a year he earned at BA.

George, like the three other defendants, has always maintained his innocence, although he did take responsibility for his department’s actions. Here’s what he said on resigning from BA:

“I now recognise that within my department, there may have been inappropriate conversations in violation of company policy in relation to long-haul fuel surcharges. I was not involved in such conversations. Although the board of BA have not found that I have behaved in a dishonest way, I fully recognise my responsibilities as head of department and as a board director.”

Time has proved George was right to maintain his innocence – but at what a cost. Ridgway, by contrast, now finds himself in an interesting situation. By whistleblowing to the OFT he implicitly admitted criminal dishonesty in order to save his own skin – even if that meant landing someone else in jail.

With the case blowing up in his face like this, his position is surely untenable. The 70,000 emails that Virgin has so mysteriously rediscovered – if they do nothing else – fundamentally undermine any conspiracy theory. They establish that Virgin had previously, and unilaterally, determined to raise the fuel price surcharge to what turned out to be the same level as BA’s.

Even speculatively, the notion of a cartel looks pretty flimsy. Why would BA and Virgin bother in the first place? Fuel surcharges are a minor part of the ticket price. And, as one of the counsels for the defence has pointed out, BA and Virgin competed on no more than 20 of BA’s 219 routes at the time. Only on three of these routes – Orlando, Grenada and Trinidad – was there no other competition. Now that hard contradictory evidence has come to light, the trial looks like a stitch-up which relied on witnesses with an agenda.

I’ll leave you with the words of George’s counsel, Clare Montgomery QC: “The world has turned upside down. If you say you are honest in making an agreement, then you may go to prison. If you say you did nothing wrong, then you’re at risk of being charged. But if you say you were dishonest, then you and your company will not be punished, you will keep your job.”

I wonder where that leaves Martin George and his career prospects?

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McCall’s ambition takes flight

March 26, 2010

Commentary on Carolyn McCall’s decision to quit the top job at Guardian Media Group in favour of the top job at Easyjet has tended to focus on two astonishing observations. The first is that she is a woman; the second, that she doesn’t know anything about aviation. Both spot on, of course. But it’s the sly implication behind them that’s the real blinder. If she’s a woman, poor dear, she’ll be utterly outclassed in the macho world of boys toys. Whatever was she thinking of leaving the comfortable, cocooned world of GMG?

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never noticed Guy Zitter, Murdoch MacLennan or Les Hinton wearing a skirt. The management of newspaper publishing, in which McCall has spent most of her career, was until very recently a dauntingly masculine environment. The first to break the glass ceiling was Sly Bailey, when she took over at Trinity Mirror in 2003 – and she herself was a product of the more genteel, feminised world of magazines. Only now is change in the air, with Rebekah Brooks (formerly Wade) taking the helm at News International.

The credit for leading the way, however, should really go to Caroline Marland, once chief executive of Guardian Newspapers, and her young protegée McCall, who succeeded her in 2004. Like any disciple of talent, McCall has exceeded the achievement of her mentor – by being the first woman to head the organisation as a whole.

There’s a second, and somewhat overlooked, dimension to McCall scaling the heights of GMG. More important than being a woman, she’s an insider; whereas traditionally the job of group ceo has gone to a seasoned outsider, well versed in the ways of the City but coasting through the autumn of their career. The late Sir Bob Phillis springs to mind. For someone like McCall, in her forties and highly ambitious, this was never going to be her last job of consequence.

All the same, it was a formative experience that created a window onto the world of plcs. On the one hand, GMG is unique in being governed by a trust, whose primary purpose is not to appease shareholders but to guarantee the editorial independence of The Guardian and associated GMG newspapers. On the other, it shares exactly the same structural problem facing the rest of the print-based media, most of whom are public limited companies: how to survive the internet. It so happened that during McCall’s tenure, this crisis has come to a head, giving her the opportunity to shape the organisation for years to come.

She’s divested and she’s acquired; she has given whole-hearted commitment to an open online strategy – as opposed to the paywall route now being explored by Rupert Murdoch et al. With what results, we cannot yet be certain. The divestment of half the Auto Trader group to private equity company Apax looked a smart move; the subsequent decision to join Apax in carving up the Emap empire less so (if only because the world financial crisis intervened, making the acquisition look very over-priced). Probably, she should have closed the heavily loss-making Observer when she had the opportunity to do so – although the decision to make cuts elsewhere is entirely understandable within the context of the Trust. The success of the online strategy pioneered by McCall and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger will be a matter of opinion for some time to come. The important point, though, is that the die has been cast.

But why, of all places, seek a new challenge in the world of aviation? In fact, the similarities between a newspaper publishing group and an airline are greater than they might seem at first sight. Both are high-fixed-cost businesses whose profitability is highly sensitive to the economic cycle. Both industries have been forced into great change in recent years, which has involved shedding costs and people. Both exist within a regulatory straitjacket that makes industry consolidation an unlikely solution to economic difficulty. Both, so far as leadership is concerned, have an entrepreneurial ‘seat of the pants’ feel to them.

I could go on…the point being that relevant, rather than previous, experience is the key requirement for the Easyjet job. Final proof being that McCall’s predecessor, Andrew Harrison, came not from the airline industry but from the RAC. He has gone on to Whitbread.

One other quality that might come in handy from McCall’s Guardian days is her skill as a boardroom tactician. The airline industry is not known for its diplomatic finesse – witness the clumsy confrontation at BA and the management style of Ryanair. But it will certainly be at a premium in the boardroom of Easyjet, where the airline’s founder and major shareholder, Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, has been in a smouldering feud with the management team over the airline’s strategy.

Good luck to her.

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Diverted Boulton makes safe landing at Nationwide

July 9, 2009

James BoultonJames Boulton, the ex-HSBC marketing director and brother of Sky TV presenter, Adam, has finally landed at Nationwide after a bizarre mini-Odyssey involving British Airways.

In circumstances still not entirely clear, Boulton seems to have quit HSBC at the beginning of the year in the belief that he had a job in the bag – a good one too – at BA as global marketing director, following in the footsteps of Tiffany Hall.

Only to discover that he did not. Having led him up the garden path, BA either withdrew the offer or halted the process. Boulton had been applying for a job that would no longer exist, due to a management “rationalisation”…

It’s another example of just how ruthless companies have become in slashing key personnel once they are deemed too expensive. Equally unsettling was Cadbury’s recent decision to get rid of its European president, Tamara Minick-Scokalo, only six months after elevating her from group commercial director.

Boulton may not have got the CMO role he was evidently looking for after HSBC declined to expand his duties (I note his successor, Brendan Cook, has been given additional responsibilities – product development and research). But he could have done a lot worse than end up at Nationwide.

In effect, he takes over the high-profile position occupied for many years by Peter Gandolfi, although the title, like much else, is different. Plenty has changed at Nationwide under the leadership of Graham Beale, including most of the key personnel. That’s only to be expected. The sleepy mega-mutual is well positioned (unlike almost any other financial services organisation) to benefit from the Credit Crunch. Big mutuals – friendly, conservative and, above all, reliable (it says in the script) – are back in fashion. And since Nationwide is by far and away the best branded and biggest – at over half the sector’s capitalisation –  it should be able to exploit this new mood much better than anyone else.

Beale has, perhaps justifiably, been whingeing about the ridiculous capital ratios (money kept back as security) being imposed on his organisation (given it is not particularly reliant on the wholesale money market, exposure to which has been a major cause of vulnerability). I notice this has not prevented Nationwide from launching an eye-catching 125% mortgage aimed at attracting people in negative equity who want to move.

Boulton, with his packaged goods skills acquired at Unilever and PepsiCo, has a promising canvas to work on.

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