Canadian airline WestJet has been around for just over two decades, but in that time has become one of Canada’s most beloved brands and was recently named as one of the Interbrand 150: Iconic Canadian Brands. Based in Calgary, Alberta, the airline is known for its caring service and touching holiday campaigns, driven by a mission of enriching the lives of everyone in WestJet’s world by providing safe, friendly and affordable air travel.
Carolyn Ray, Managing Director of Interbrand Canada spoke with Richard Bartrem, WestJet’s Vice President of Marketing Communications, about the brand’s iconic status, approach to building a strong company culture, and how it plans to sustain growth in the future.
What do you think makes the WestJet brand iconic?
In our first year we did $35 million in sales with just three aircraft, and then grew very quickly from there. Over the course of more than 20 years, we’ve gone from three planes to over 150, flying to more than 100 destinations. Over the last decade, we’ve started focusing on the caring aspect of the brand more and more. What we did in 1996 was the antithesis of what people expected in the airline space. Part two is very much the same thing over again, where a caring, fun brand that can give you great value is the antithesis of what people are expecting. I think that those two pieces are what has allowed us to become an iconic brand for Canada.
In your marketing and elsewhere you highlight WestJet’s employee “owners” and the lengths they go to make customers happy. How do you make sure that they’re able to deliver on that promise and really live up to the WestJet brand?
The notion of ownership is really important. When we launched the Owners platform in 2005, we had come out with a whole new brand campaign that we were quite proud of. However, when we showed it to our employee base, all you could hear were crickets. It didn’t fit with how they saw their role. So everyone gave their feedback, and we took the summer to re-shoot. We learned that what really resonated was the fact that our WestJetters are part owners in the company, and more than 80 percent of the employees are shareholders. This gave our customers a reason to believe that WestJet hustles more than its competitors, because our employees have a stake. We’ve continued to run with that Owner platform since 2005.
How does WestJet handle recruitment? Are there certain qualities you’re looking for in a WestJet employee?
Yes. It’s all about who is going to work and collaborate together the best. One of the things I’m fond of is that during recruitment we bring everyone together, split them into groups, and assign them the task of building a paper airplane.
It really is interesting, because on one side you have people saying “Well, this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. I’m not going to build one.” Which means you’re probably not going to work for us. On the other side of the curve, you have those who say, “This is awesome, I am the provincial paper plane-making champion, out of my way—I’m in charge.” That’s not necessarily going to be the fit we’re looking for either. However there are always people who say, “You know what. This is fun. I can’t believe that this is part of my interview!” and then we know we’ve got somebody we believe is going to help us build a strong brand experience for our customers.
WestJet is working towards debuting a new low-cost airline. Is this new brand going to align with WestJet’s brand, or is it going to take things in a new direction?
The brand identity will be very different from WestJet, and the customer service delivery will also probably be different. The rise of low-cost carriers looks a lot like what WestJet did to the industry 20 plus years ago. We recognize that there’s an opportunity for us to do that once again. But we wanted very much for this to be a separate brand experience from WestJet, because it is going to be completely unbundled service. What you’ll get in return is a terrifically low price. We believe there’s a segment of the market that is willing to sacrifice a lot of the products and services that they are used to getting so they can spend those savings on themselves.
WestJet is known for its funny and experiential campaigns, especially around the holidays. How do you refresh your approach and subvert people’s expectations each year?
We started by writing fake press releases, which was really more for our employees to have some fun. Then along comes YouTube, which allowed us to build out this fun program without needing to rely on the media picking it up. It was quite easy to do so, because we have a very talented in-house creative team. It was from there that we said “OK, everybody’s doing flash mobs: We need a flash mob.” So we did one, and it really blew the doors off.
We ended up with a billion Twitter impressions in the first month. It was viewed 45 million times, and it’s been viewed in every country in the world at least once.
Afterwards, we had a conversation about how it was a fool’s game to try and top it. Instead, we decided to focus on telling a really nice and caring WestJet story. This isn’t about getting more views, this is about telling our WestJet stories within the context of showing the world what a caring airline looks like, and we will continue to do that.
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