Behind the Brand®

Building a Globally Competitive Brand with Richard Bartrem from WestJet

Richard Bartrem is the Vice President of Marketing Communications for the brand we all know and love, WestJet. WestJet launched in 1996 with just three aircraft and five destinations and soon became the second-largest Canadian airline. Now, with a fleet of over 150 aircraft, WestJet provides flights to more than 100 different destinations worldwide. Operating an average of 700 flights and carrying over 66,000 passengers per day. Richard has been along for much of that growth.

Over the last 16 years, Richard has been an integral part of the Christmas Miracle campaigns, the expansion of WestJet into a global brand. The introduction of the 787 Dreamliner, and the growth of the WestJet Rewards program. All the while maintaining a culture of care and fun for the WestJet community.

Listen to the full episode here:

Embarking on Change

Jeff: What could someone not find out about you just simply by googling you?

Richard: It's funny because I've been in the airline business now for 16 plus years and yet had no airline experience. I was quite fortunate to lock into the gig I have right now. I was born and raised in Montreal, went to school in Ontario, and then came back to work in Montreal. I was bartending to pay for school and was offered a job by a guy walking in off the street, who said, “Show me a good time.” I said, “Fine, show me a credit card.” So the next day, he came in and said, “Hey, you know, that was a lot of fun last night. You said you have a university degree. Are you looking for work?” And I said, “Well, I am, yeah.” We got to talking, and that's how I started with Unilever and ended up spending 13 years with them in Montreal, then Halifax, Calgary, Toronto, and then ultimately back in Calgary now.

Jeff: [As for] your background, I believe you went to Western and got a Political Science degree.

Richard: Certainly, it has been my experience that “perspective” has become one of the biggest words that I have found over my career. Maybe not having the specific experience that somebody is looking for, but can you bring a perspective based on your experience that adds to the role? And that's where I've been terrifically lucky and somewhat successful.

Jeff: At what point did you transition from traditional sales marketing to landing the gig at WestJet?

Richard: My boss at Unilever came into my office and said, “I think it's time for you to leave.” And having never been fired, I thought, okay, so this is how it works. So that was my first question, “Am I being fired?” He said, “No, but the company is changing, and I'm leaving as well. I think it's probably best for your career if you were to leave.” So I was gone six months later and ended up in television marketing.

The Power of Relationship Building

Jeff: So he recommended to you that you also quit your job and go to a different company just because the company is changing?

Richard: Yeah, he was a terrific mentor for me because that was the nudge I needed to recognize that I was terrifically comfortable with what I was doing. I enjoyed it, but did I get too comfortable? I think he saw in me the opportunity to do more, and he was certainly embarking on that himself. He ended up being president of TAXI, the advertising agency that we were using at Astral for the Movie Network, which also happened to be the advertising agency for WestJet.

I went and had breakfast with him and said, “You know, I'm thinking about moving out West. I'm intrigued by WestJet, and I know they're a client of yours. Do you think they're looking?” And he said, “Well, funny, you should ask, they had a role.” This is where it gets truly serendipitous because he said they had a Director of Brand and Communications out there, but I didn't see it, and it closed yesterday. He said, “If you leave now, go back to the office, email me your resume, and I'll throw it in. Let’s see what happens.”

Two weeks later, I was interviewing and flew out for the day. It was one of those WestJet brand moments because now I'm doing as much reading and finding out everything I can about them, and they're fun and irreverent. So it's five in the morning, and I'm in Toronto getting dressed to get on the plane, and I'm standing in front of the mirror with a tie. I’m holding it up in front of me and putting it on and off, and I finally decided to go with the tie and said, “Well, it's easier to take off if I have it than to not have it with me.” So wore it and flew out. The first thing they said when I got into the interview room was, “What's with the tie?” They then started looking for a pair of scissors to cut it off and couldn't find any, so I got to keep the tie. And then, sure enough, got the job.

That goes back to perspective as well. If you look at the qualifications I had, and what they were looking for, it wasn't a 100% fit. I did say, “Let me give you a perspective that I think is missing within this organization. You are now a national airline, and to the best of my knowledge, there isn't anybody on this marketing team born east of Manitoba. You don't have anybody that speaks French. You don't have anybody from Quebec, and you don't have that perspective of the rest of this country which is something I bring to the table. And if you're going to be this national airline, you need somebody that has a bit of a broader understanding of the country.” And so they fell for it.

Jeff: So talk about the power of relationships there. Your mentor tells you to leave your job. You listen to him, and that same mentor helps you get this job. Now it's been 16 years. You don't see people staying in careers for that long anymore. People hop around. Even right now, people are talking about the great resignation. When you got to WestJet, did you see this as something that you’d be at for a long time? Or is it something that every year you're like, “Wow, this keeps getting better and better”?

Richard: When I got to WestJet, the growth trajectory that our airline was on was exhilarating. It would have been the summer of 2005. We were at 45 aircraft, and I think we would be 180 today. There was excitement about adding new destinations, destinations within Canada, then making a bigger play into the United States. We were looking at Mexico and the Caribbean, then into Europe, then new aircraft types. Every day coming to work, there was something new and exciting that we were working on. You speak of mentors. The guy who hired me at WestJet back in 2005 recognized that I could bring some fun to the brand. He and I had a lot of fun times together. He said to me fairly early on when I arrived there, “You know this is the best job you will ever have,” and I said, “Don't I know it.”

Mastering Communication and Marketing

Jeff: I've seen some of your work. You truly have mastered communications and marketing. Most businesses are difficult to get off the ground in the early days. Can you share any stories about the early days and what it was like getting an airline off the ground?

Richard: In 1996, when we started, three planes were serving five cities in Western Canada, with 200 employees. If you're looking at a 737, that will be anywhere from $70 to $90 million per aircraft. We now have 110 - 112 of those in the fleet. These are bets that you are making based on what you know right now, so you are hoping that the market will continue to grow. What was great about the early days, and the attitude is still there, [is] that you're going to have to roll up your sleeves and help out where you can.

In the early days, everybody cleaned the aircraft. When we would land somewhere at a particular destination, as our guests were deplaning, you’d see employees cleaning the plane. Those are people flying on standby or some of the crew who operated. They're cleaning the plane so that we’re ready to board by the time the last guest gets off. That allowed us to get better utilization out of the plane because a plane sitting on the ground is not making money. If you can shave 20 minutes here and 20 minutes there over a day, that adds up to one more flight, you could get out of that aircraft.

There was this empowerment to say, “I've got an idea” or “I'm going to go do something that's going to be for the betterment of the airline.” It was very much this can-do attitude, the idea of being the underdog. When you go back to 1996, you had Air Canada and Canadian Airlines fighting amongst themselves and going for market share. Westjet [was] able to tiptoe in. Nobody paid attention [to us] in the first few years, but we were off and running.

Behind the Brand

Jeff: When I think about the history of WestJet, it was a Western Canadian brand, then a Canadian brand, and now a global brand. Can you share any of the challenges you and the team went through having to mature the brand?

Richard: If you follow the age of an airline, it follows the age of a human being. When we were ten years old, we were that fun and friendly airline with the personality of a 10-year-old. Then you recognize that as you are now maturing and approaching 25 years old this year, your personality doesn't necessarily change but the expression of that personality changes. Even when we started back in 1996, the idea was to grow the market. The idea was that we would get people on a bus or car to get on a plane, or we would get the people who weren't going anywhere to get off the couch and get on a plane.

“Your personality doesn't necessarily change, but the expression of that personality changes”

The pricing was dramatic. At the time, you couldn't buy a one-way ticket, at least not cost-effectively. A return ticket, Calgary to Vancouver would usually have been about $800. We were selling Calgary to Vancouver for $59, so we were the first airline to bring low-cost carrier flights. We grew the market organically ourselves. We also realized that airlines were trying to price match us, which grew the market. Once we had that market, we then had the leisure traveller. As we started to fly into the Caribbean and Mexico, it became almost priming the pump that you would send out enough Canadians to these sun destinations. There would be enough people out there that you would have a full plane going in both directions.

We would always largely advertise to Canadians to say, “Hey, we're the airline for you because we're going to be friendly, and we're going to care more than the competition. The pricing is going to be better, and we've got a terrific product.” Then, we had to target people in other countries to say, “Hey, you know what, you may never have heard of this airline, but if you’re coming to Canada, fly with us.”

Jeff: Many brands, as they mature, realize they need to appeal to different people. They get into almost an identity crisis where they're trying to reach new customers, but their current customers ask for better versions of the same thing. How have you guys appealed to different people?

Richard: That’s a great question because it has been an existential question for us for a long time. If you think back to the early days of WestJet, it predated any seatback television or WestJet Connect, so none of those pieces existed. It was very much about getting people off the couch or out of the car and onto a plane. That fun and friendly approach presented itself as toilet paper races. You go back to the early days, we would hand a roll of toilet paper to either side of the airplane, and they would pass the roll over their head to the back. We would see which side could get to the back of the plane first. If you think about that today, that it just seems juvenile is unfair, but that's who we were as a two or three-year-old brand.

Now, as we expanded, we started to target other consumers because there are only so many people in Canada that you can target who want to do that type of flying. We were going to need to go after different travellers. When you start getting into our segmentation study, we recognize that there is a business traveller out there, and they fly multiple times a year. They are looking for an entirely different set of experiences and products, and services than the other segment might be looking for.

Jeff: It's that culture of fun that you guys have created that I find interesting because you're in an incredibly regulated industry, but you've been able to infuse fun. How do you balance fun with high performance?

Richard: At the end of the day, it is an aluminum cylinder that flies at 40,000 feet, and the competition has an aluminum cylinder that flies at 40,000 feet. Both us and the competition do 400-500 miles an hour at ground speed. We land in the same city that everybody else lands in and taxi to the same airport. The competition matches us so quickly, even the pricing is largely the same. All things are equal, but the difference for us becomes the people.

Where we have been fortunate in that the fun comes from hiring for those sorts of people who recognize, here's the job, but the expression of you within that job is what we're looking for. We need you to follow standard operating procedures from a safety and transport perspective, but the charm that you as an individual will bring to the role is important.

I would say the first word we would use from a brand perspective would be “care”. It is an incredibly intimate word. And sometimes, the care will express itself differently than you might like it to. We care enough that we're going to cancel this flight in the name of safety, or we're going to have to make a decision that may not be what you are looking for. But from a communications perspective, we're going to be transparent. We’re going to be forthright that all is rooted in care.

“The first word we would use from a brand perspective would be “care"

Jeff: I feel like many of our listeners have experienced flying on a plane and have probably experienced something that didn't go as planned. I find it hilarious [as a traveller] myself, if a flight gets cancelled [or] I arrive and have to sit on the tarmac for maybe half an hour, an hour longer. I forget that I just flew through the air like a bird and travelled across a continent and arrived on the other side safely. That's pretty incredible. What advice would you have for other brands when things may not go as planned and you have to adjust and communicate some disappointment to the customer?

Richard: I think a great example of that would probably be the Boeing Max aircraft. They had originally made the Boeing Classic and then the Boeing Next Generation, and then they introduced the Boeing Max in 2017. Unfortunately, there were two crashes that resulted in the worldwide grounding of the Max. We recognized that these aircraft were going to come back and fly once again at some point.

How “care” showed up for us was how we demonstrated to two audiences, the travelling public and our own people working on this aircraft, confidence and trust in the aircraft. I would put forward the work that our team did as best in class globally to reassure people that this is a safe aircraft for you to get on. We started with a video series called ‘Beyond the Aircraft.’ A pilot introduced the flight attendant, a cabin crew member, and one of our aircraft maintenance engineers, getting the public to understand that everybody has someone to go home to. Everybody wants to come home, and we will not put anything forward that isn't entirely safe.

Canadian Brands

Jeff: WestJet reflects Canadian values of caring and giving. One thing that comes to mind when I think of that is the Christmas Miracle campaigns you have done. I don't know how you guys pulled this off, and I'd love for you to share. Tell us how you put this together because I looked this morning, and you've got 50 million views on it.

Richard: It's funny because we've been doing them for a while. The first one was in 2012. We decided we needed to do a flash mob. We did one at the Calgary airport, at the end of the A-Pier, where all those gates dead end. We turned that whole gate area into the North Pole in 60 seconds. We had all these people who looked like they were guests getting ready to travel when in fact, they were our employees. And as soon as they ripped off their jackets, they were in ugly Christmas sweaters, and Santa arrived. We decided that our Santa would be blue because the competition headquartered east of us is red, of course.

In 2013, the team came up with this idea to say, “What if you could build this giant gift box in an airport with a video screen that would connect you directly to Santa?” You could scan your boarding pass, and Santa would pop up. Having scanned your boarding pass, we now know who you are. Meanwhile, people are standing in that airport [communicating] back to Santa, feeding him information. I think the most beautiful part of the whole stunt was that we had not set any expectations. It wasn't, “Hey, talk to Santa, and you could win.” It was quite simply a moment where you are waiting for the plane to board, and you are bored, and you go over and talk to Santa because it's something to do. You had this opportunity to speak with Santa, and pretty well everybody took us up on it.

It was just such a nice moment to say, “Merry Christmas, I hope you're going to see family.” Unbeknownst to those people having the conversations with blue Santa, we were now taking a list. We were running off to the shopping centre to pick up all the gifts people had asked for. We are wrapping like mad and getting back to the airport to have all these gifts ready to go. Now that buzzer goes, and the belt starts turning, and everybody looks instinctively to see if their luggage is the first one coming off. Out comes a gift with a large bow and somebody’s name, and then another gift and another gift. Then people realize, “Wait a minute, that's my name!”

We knew this team did excellent work, and we knew the creativity was wonderful. So we were thinking [views] in the millions would be fair. The morning that we released it, it skyrocketed. For three days it doubled every day, as more and more people started to watch it. All of a sudden, our public relations team comes around the corner and says to me, “Can you do CNN at two o'clock?” “What do you mean? What can I do? Can I watch CNN?” “No, can you be on CNN?”

Jeff: I love [it] when Canadians are doing things that get global recognition. Then we have other countries looking to us and taking cues. I mean, I can only imagine how many other companies are trying to replicate that, and the execution must have been incredible. Even before that, I think there are many people in companies that have these ideas. If I imagine someone coming to me and saying, “Hey, we want to do exactly what you did,” I would have to take a step back and really look at that. On the outside, it sounds like a [silly] idea. How did you guys get this idea won within WestJet?

Richard: You have to trust the people doing the work to do the work. When they came forward with the idea, we loved it. If you're going to be this challenger brand, you will have to try these different things. I go back to when I started in 2005. We had never done anything to do with April Fools’. Our first April Fools’ predates YouTube, where we just wrote a press release. The press release said that if you look at our planes, they've got little winglets at the end that stick straight up at the end of the wings. We said that in conjunction with Boeing, we've determined that if we can get the guests travelling on the plane to assume that position for takeoff, that improves fuel efficiency. So we put it out as a press release, and the National Post ran with it and recognized it for what it was. We had people phoning in to say, “You know I'll be damned if I'm going to help you save money by sitting like this for takeoff.” So we were off and running.

“What we do is reunite people”

It can be an incredibly serious category or industry. But at the same time, so much of the gravity and the seriousness of the industry is around the safety side of things, which is exactly as it should be. Having said that, what we do is reunite people. And so the warmth and caring and wonderful moments that exist in those, you can show caring and have fun. At the same time, given who we are, this brand would probably do April Fools’ jokes, so we should do them.

Communication and Culture

Jeff: When you look at the marketing and communications that WestJet is doing, you say that this is really just expressing your culture. To say that, as a company, part of your culture is about not taking yourself too seriously and having fun, then [do] you have to do these things?

Richard: One of the early mantras at WestJet was that you could take the job seriously, but not yourself. It had been this idea of absolutely taking the job seriously, particularly given what we do. But in terms of that customer service and that delivery piece, and from a brand perspective, air travel should be fun. I mean, you're in this chair in the sky, as you travel across the world, that is fun. Then when you get there, you're probably doing something fun. The expression of that fun through the WestJet culture has been the backbone of what's made us successful. It’s a commodity, but what we do is deliver an interaction with people that is better than the competition.

Jeff: We've been talking a lot about marketing communications, but one of the things we’ve seen generating demand from customers has been the rise of aggregators, such as travel websites. My background is co-founding SkipTheDishes, which is an aggregator of restaurants. And we've seen this now with Expedia and booking.com. There are a lot of brands now that are in positions where they're working with a travel site, a food delivery website, Amazon, eBay, or even Craigslist, which are all marketplaces and platforms. How does WestJet look at these travel sites in terms of leveraging them and seeing them as an important part of the business?

Richard: Even if you go pre-aggregators and look at bricks and mortar travel agents, WestJet’s early success and continued success are rooted in travel agents. It would have been very difficult for us to make it if we did not have the support and backing of the travel agent community across Canada. Some of that has now morphed into aggregators. You now have websites that pull content and offer it conveniently for that consumer to understand.

I could go to three or four different websites for all these airlines, or I could find everything right here. They're an important partner of ours, but it puts us at a bit of an arm's length relationship with consumers. If the travel agent owns that relationship with that traveller, then any communication we do needs to be through that travel agent. When we're providing updates, it will be to a travel agent. Then that relationship is the one that's maintained with the consumer at the end of the day. They are an important part of the overall ecosystem and [we] work very well with them.

Jeff: I was reading earlier that there was an issue around refunds during COVID-19. You guys did such a good job of coming out and just owning it and apologizing for it, and then, making good on it. Why do you think it’s so difficult for brands to do that?

Richard: Well, I think we owned it as best we could. And it’s a remarkably complicated file.

Jeff: You spoke on it publicly and said, “We understand the difficulty this caused people, and we apologize for that.” And that’s more than a lot of brands will do.

Richard: Rarely is there is a media interview we should not take. The general public has a right to know what’s going on, and we are a high-profile brand in a high-profile industry that everybody follows. We have to be forthright, and I believe we need to be out there. So I think, back to what’s in the way is the way. We’re going to lead with our chin, and you have to go out and take your lumps.

Jeff: Listen, Richard. I’ve been a huge fan of what you guys have been doing—running an incredibly challenging business with grace through a very challenging time and some of the work you guys have done over the years—building a global brand headquartered here. Thanks for coming on the show.