A spoonful of easyJet

John V Willshire

john.willshire@phdnetwork.com

This was originally a submission for Module 4 of the IPA Excellence Diploma, and based on two hypothetical questions.

Part 1 is what ten metrics should a company like easyJet use to measure brand performance, and part 2 is what should the IPA do to encourage better brand measurement.

This is not an official easyJet document, of course, just using their brand as an example.

IPA Excellence DiplomaModule 4: Measurement and Brands

Included here are the responses to assignments 1 and 2, as both responses cross reference each other.

They are in two distinct sections:

Part 1: easyJet – simple and fast (word count 796)

Part 2: A spoonful of sugar (word count 1,170)

References

Part 1: easyJet – simple and fast

easyJet is a business that moves quickly. Every day it flies an average of 353 passengers on each of its 289 routes from 77 different airports1.

Despite this difficult market place, by concentrating on maximising efficiencies and minimising costs2 easyJet has cemented its position as the leader in the low cost airline market.

But in a market so fast, fluid and price sensitive (Shaw & Merrick3), is there any place for ‘brand’ metrics, which are traditionally slow and retrospective4?

The answer is yes, but only if the brand metrics can move as fast as easyJet.

The primary aim for easyJet is to maximise the number of seats available (capacity), and then fill every flight on every route. How close they come to achieving this determines the easyJet share price5.

For the easyJet marketing team to be most effective, they should monitor the effects of their various marketing activities in ‘real time’6, since sales data is available in real time7, as is the customer data behind each sale8.

So by using readily available, daily data sources easyJet can create a system (Broadbent9) which, by combining brand and business metrics10, can provide the marketing team with instant information showing the effect of what they are doing on the brand.

To do this, we must track ten key brand metrics across three areas; activities by easyJet, activities by its competitors and customer reactions.

easyJet activity

1. Marketing contacts

Collect all customer contacts; advertising, branded search, crm etc

Collate by time, by type, by size, and by regions11

Agencies can prepare good estimates before campaigns go live12

Essential for measuring marketing input

2. PR coverage

Conventional PR tracking13 is costly

Make use of more readily available resources

Volume: Google news & blog tracking 14

Tone: Surveying easyJet’s own PR function15

Measures the ‘buzz’ surrounding the easyJet brand

Competitor activity

3. Cost of search

In addition to ‘volume of branded search’ use ‘cost per search term’

Use the cost of paid-for-search as a measure of competitive activity16

Serves as a good indicator of competitive activity on key terms

4. Market pricing

Tracking which doesn’t involve costly man-hours would be preferential

Create a system which scans competitor sites or price aggregators such as PriceRunner to save time and man-hour costs

Competitive pricing in the market is very important in such a price-elastic industry17

Customer reaction

5. Relative brand warmth18

Simple online question: “position the jets according to how you feel”19

Recontact easyJet database to minimise recruitment costs

Aim for a daily sample of 300+20

Incentivise with ‘win a free flight …’

Enables matching of brand responses to customer data & behaviour

6, 7 & 8 - the website as a brand experience

Just like a high-street store21, easyJet’s website is a key brand touchpoint

The key difference is that easyJet’s ‘in-store’ activity is very traceable22.

There are 3 key metrics to measure:

6. Site entry

Which marketing activities people click through from (search, ads etc)

Which sites, including competitors, have people come from

Are they existing or new customers

7. Site activity

How long do people spend on the site

How many options do they look at

Perhaps most crucially, how many convert into a sale

8. Site exit

If they have not purchased, where do they fall out

If they have, do they purchase any additional offerings

Do they leave, then come back

How many go to competitor sites

9. Customer satisfaction

Make Net Promoter23 work even harder

The question is included in the booking email confirmation

It is then included again in a thank you email sent post flight

Each score is linked back to the customer profile

Allows not just overall brand satisfaction scoring, but highlights any discrepancies between booking and flight.

10. Complaints

This sector is perhaps more prone than most to complaints

Track the volume and nature of complaints and the speed of resolution

Essential to monitor how quickly negative brand experiences can be turned into positive ones24

Using the metrics

These metrics can be brought together in a system of effects to quantify the relationship between marketing and sales. Marketing affects sales in two ways:

Directly, in the short term, helping to fill capacity

Indirectly, in the long term, increasing customer warmth

The metrics can then be analysed for any time period desired to demonstrate which marketing efforts are the most effective in the short and long term

Finally, the metrics, like easyJet itself, need to be easy, simple and fast for users, through a simple dashboard interface for the marketing teams and agencies to use26.

Part 2: A spoonful of sugar

Yesterday at work I participated in a brainstorm, ran another, explained “The Experience Economy”2 to someone, and thought about how to find out more about the potential audience for Japanese Anime films. Quite a fun day, all told, and by no means an unusual one; this is a great industry to work in.

Which is where brand measurement has a bit of a problem; compared to most things we do on a daily basis, brand measurement can be rather dry and hard to get excited about.

Of course, it’s important to not make grand, sweeping statements without backing them up. After all, it might just be me who thinks this.

So I asked my peers from a variety of different agencies two questions; how important do you think brand measurement is, and how interesting do you find it3? The charts below show the results.

The good news is that just under two thirds of respondents consider brand measurement to be ‘very important’ for clients. The IPA’s ‘effectiveness’ message has clearly got through.

But people don’t find it as interesting as they perhaps should, especially given how important they clearly know it to be4.

I believe the IPA should seize the initiative in brand measurement by making people in the industry more interested in brand measurement rather than just underlining its importance.

Great in principle, of course, but how the IPA can go about this? Well, if a client came to an agency with a similar problem, how would we solve it?

A marketing problem

What can you do about a target audience who aren’t as interested in your product as you’d like?

One suggestion we could make is “change the target audience”. Find people who are interested in what you have to sell, and sell it to them instead.

For the IPA this would mean encouraging agencies to diversify the work force, and bring in talent into the industry whose skills and interests are more attuned to brand measurement.

Basically, just let ‘the numbers guys’ do the numbers.

Whilst this undoubtedly helps agencies develop new abilities5, it doesn’t directly address the problem of engaging those people already working on brands for our clients.

For these people, we need to tackle how the product itself is presented. We must use the creativity we employ regularly on our clients’ behalf to package and sell the ‘measurement of brands’ as an exciting, compelling area of our work.

To make people “very interested” in the job of brand measurement, we must find the ‘element of fun’ as Mary Poppins recommended.

Creatively harnessing data

What makes this more difficult is that we have more data on brands than ever before. As demonstrated in the first assignment6 firms such as easyJet are surrounded by endless rich, fluid data that they can capture to create complex models.

It is no longer strictly the case, as Ambler7 stated, that “few companies have a comprehensive database for all types of metrics”.

It is just that few companies have managed to tame the mountain of data they have available into a ‘comprehensive database’, either as a scorecard of metrics, or even a ‘metric of metrics’ (Binet / Field8).

The data that is collected is then seldom presented in such a way that makes it easy for people to engage with them and understand them.

Yet we work in one of the most creative industries in the world, whose purpose is to make people engage more with products.

How would you even start making data and metrics more engaging? Well, there’s one industry who knows how...

The job’s a game

The gaming sector is built on data, constructing huge, complex models of interaction between thousands of variables and millions of data points. They do this in order to make game play as realistic and challenging as possible for human players who have far more processing power in their heads than any computer or console.

As an example, let’s look at the genre of ‘God Games’, and specifically Civilization IV10.

The basic premise is that you take control of one civilisation on Earth, and compete against other civilisations on the planet.

The player has a range of variables, such as diplomacy, combat, production & trade, or technological investment, to advance their civilisation faster than any other, in order to colonise the star system Alpha Centuri first.

Much of the game play is dependent on variables outside the control of the player, but what matters most is how quickly they react and adjust the variables in their power.

It sounds just like brand management, with the exception of the interstellar space travel11.

Control the variables, and outperform the competition in the short term, in order to win the long term prize.

By designing game-like interfaces which sit over the top of the brand measurement systems, we can engage the people who find measurement only ‘fairly interesting’ (or worse) by presenting the effects of their actions in a fun way.

Just as you don’t need to be a computer programmer to enjoy and excel at computer games, you needn’t be a specialist in complex measurement techniques to enjoy and excel at 21st century brand management.

The easyJet weather

How would this work in practice? Let’s look at the proposed easyJet metrics from the first assignment12 as an example. Imagine the image below is a dashboard which sits on the desks of everyone in the easyJet marketing team and their agencies.

On the left, you select precise regions and time periods to look at.

Then, the report in the middle presents you with 4 key measures of performance over that period:

The warmth of customers towards the brand13

The strength of the marketing “wind” 14

The “humidity” level showing how high your conversion figures are15

The amount of competitor “rainfall” there was in the same period16

Finally, on the right hand side, the forecast presents you with both short and long term outcomes for a given set of marketing inputs which you then adjust to calculate the trade off in doing short-term sales affecting activity and longer term brand building activity.

This approach means the metrics powering the model lie underneath this interface, allowing users to engage with brand measurement in a fun, dynamic way.

The IPA’s role

The IPA has enjoyed great success in promoting ‘effectiveness’, but must now go beyond promoting the ‘importance’ of brand measurement as a discipline, and encourage more creative presentation of metrics.

This can be achieved by bringing together agencies and measurement specialists with people they can learn much from; games developers, digital creative agencies, social networking sites… essentially anyone who deals with the presenting data in as engaging a way as possible. Because it’s no longer about just using metrics; it’s about how we use them.

If we enjoy brand measurement, we will help our clients build and maintain better brands.

As Mary Poppins said; if we can find the fun in a job, then “every task we undertake becomes a piece of cake...”

References

Part 1: easyJet – simple and fast

1. easyJet 2007 preliminary results: http://tinyurl.com/25e69n

2. easyJet investor relations website: http://tinyurl.com/2xf235

3. “Marketing Payback” – R Shaw & D Merrick

4. “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” – T Kuhn

We measure brands in the way we do because previously we had no feasible way of collecting precise, dynamic data on a mass scale. There was no alternative to replace the paradigm, as Kuhn says.

5. Fluctuations in easyJet’s share price is largely dependent on how many people the airline carries, and how high the load factor is - http://tinyurl.com/yu4sue

6. An explanantion of ‘real-time’ computing can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/2gvssz

…and the importance for easyJet underlined by this quote from the NMA article in the reading materials:

“The value of Web measurement can’t be underestimated... [It’s] critical to the day to day running of internet based businesses…”

Ben Carter, New Media Age

7. 95% of easyJet sales are online: http://tinyurl.com/ypbemz , and therefore the data can be collected in real time

8. The customer inputs for booking a flight on easyJet are name, address, phone number, and reason for trip.

9. “Campaign evaluation through modelling” – S Broadbent

10. The question set states “Assuming that basic measures such as sales, footfall, turnover and margin are given…” , so I have assumed the following for the easyJet business model would also be included in ‘basic measures’:

i) Distribution: Not just the distribution of which airports easyJet fly from, but the proportion of the airports they fly to… if easyJet don’t fly the route you wish to travel, you obviously won’t choose them to fly with.

ii) Market share: The % of LCC flights that easyJet account for, again by airport and by route

11. As noted in reference 10, looking at the regionality by airport is key for this marketplace, so every effort must be taken to collect marketing contacts by the catchment area of each airport.

For every different airport, there will be differing easyjet strengths, and hugely varying competitive strengths and weaknesses by region.  So when collecting advertising contacts, rather than follow "traditional" tv regions that most advertisers measure, you’d look to airport catchment areas.

12. Agencies can buy posters, press etc and estimate, by region, how many contacts there will be per day for the campaign, and build it in to the model before the event. Online ads and search can be monitored in real time.

13. There are a good few companies around who collect pr mentions (and a good synopsis can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/34ntu2) but they are perhaps more costly than a business like easyJet could afford.

14. Google news/blog trackers can give precise stories and blog posts by day, take a few seconds to collate, and can be retrospectively collected for any given period – an example can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/2la9f2

15. This is inspired by “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell: One quick, simple judgement by easyJet’s own PR experts, aggregated across client and PR agency, it will provide a good sense of how the ‘volume’ of pr is balanced by the ‘tone’.

16. Because paid-for search is such a major part of the marketing efforts in this sector, it can give a sense of competitive activity; if you have to bid more to maintain your place at the top of key search terms, then there is increased competitive focus on these searches. A full explanation of how Google’s paid for search is here - http://tinyurl.com/26rlv4

17. From Yahoo Overture analysis: only 15% of all flight searches include any form of brand… the vast majority of people search for a flight & price first, and brand second.

18. Awareness for a market leader such as easyJet isn’t that useful; I’ve seen some awareness data as tracked by a competitor (which I am unable to reproduce here due to confidentiality) which shows awareness of easyJet consistently high across continual periods.

What is useful is relative warmth compared to competitors, as stated in “20 ways advertising works for business / Chapter 1…” by Leslie Butterfield

Collecting this on a daily basis yourself is certainly feasible, although there are also things like Yougov’s Brand Index (http://tinyurl.com/yqackm ) which tracks brand ‘buzz’ for over 1,100 brands on a daily basis, from which you can get competitive brand information too (http://tinyurl.com/26egc9), which means you could proxy relative brand warmth.

19. The internet offers far more engaging and playful opportunities for quantitative research; as an example, see http://tinyurl.com/ywkmfy

20. Some rudimentary maths, based on easyJet 2007 preliminary results: http://tinyurl.com/25e69n

i) There were 37.2 million easyJet passengers in 2007

ii) 70% of operations are UK based, so let’s assume 70% are British

iii) Assume average usage of 3, gives you 8.68m unique users

iv) 95% book online, so there are 8.246m email addresses

v) We incentivise the research by offering a free return flight for a randomly drawn respondent every week

vi) We invite people to answer the question once every three months, so every day we can contact 90,367 potential respondents

vii) With a response rate of just 0.5%, we would achieve a sample of 452 respondents

21. “Smart retail” - Richard Hammond (from module 3 reading list)

22. Just to clarify ‘very traceable’…

This ComScore (www.comscore.com) report shows the ‘source and loss’ for the easyJet website, but it can be conducted in real time using other tools such as Webtrends (http://www.webtrends.com/). The latter also collects all manner of on-site behavioural statistics.

Cookies (http://tinyurl.com/29qmkc) can track past visits and activities to your site, and be activated when you return.23. Net Promoter may have it’s sceptics (like in “The Net Promoter debate” – Tim Keiningham), but I think it would work well as proposed in this two-stage way... it’d be really interesting to see how long it takes people to book again if their score after the flight is lower than when they made the booking

24. Seth Godin’s post on ‘the last interaction’ (http://tinyurl.com/yvs788 ) is a great illustration of why resolving complaints quickly is important

25. See Part 2, “A spoonful of sugar”

References

Part 2: A spoonful of sugar

1. “A Spoonful of Sugar”, by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, from the 1964 Walt Disney Productions film

2. The Experience Economy, by Pine II and Gilmore (module 1 reading)

3. I carried out a survey using Survey Monkey (http://tinyurl.com/2kpngc) and structured the following quick questionnaire:

Think about the ways in which you ‘measure’ the performance of the brands you work on.

This could be through tools such as quantitative research studies, brand tracking or econometric modelling.

i. How interesting do you find this area for the brands you work on?

Very interestingFairly interestingFairly uninterestingVery uninteresting

ii. How important do you feel this area is for the brands you work on?

Very importantFairly importantFairly unimportantVery unimportant

iii. If you wish, please describe what you like / dislike about the area of brand measurement from your experience.

I sent this round to friends, colleagues and acquaintances who worked on brands in a wider variety of agencies

4. Survey results: as well as the data which shows we don’t find brand measurement as interesting as we might, the final open ended question gave a sense of the frustration with the area, and matched the list from the opening course presentation of ‘the problems with metrics now’:

We measure too little

“I dislike that people don't do it enough.”

“Clients struggle to assign budget to it - they're more worried about the short term than the long term due to the pressure they are under to deliver immediately.”

We pick the wrong metrics

“tracking surveys like Millward Brown or Synovate, these surveys cannot provide the answers that we often need - like did my radio promotion drive people through to store or was that the Outdoor?”

“Dislike same old repetitive monthly trackers which show nothing new or radical but just waste time”

We evaluate them poorly

“The people who are in charge of it - over complicate it. They don't have the skills to simplify for clients - who then become afraid of it and refuse to do it”

“I think clients tend to focus on one thing, be it econometrics, tracking etc. and you will get a better picture from looking at a range of measurement”

We undervalue their contribution

“The measurements are fairly vague and the impacts on those measurements, even vaguer”

“Don't like the disconnect between brand measurement scores/kpis and sales”

5. The broadening of the skill sets of agencies is a very welcome thing, ably assisted by the IPA in publishing materials such as “Econometrics Explained” - Louise Cook and Mike Holmes

6. See Part 1, “easyJet – simple and fast”

7. “Marketing & the bottom line” – Tim Ambler

8. Marketing in the era of accountability – Les Binet & Peter Field

9. From Wikipedia’s entry on ‘God Games’ - http://tinyurl.com/2xajfd

10. Wikipedia’s entry on Civilization IV - http://tinyurl.com/yvphe3

11. Space travel is of course actually being offered by Virgin, but not Interstellar space travel… yet - http://tinyurl.com/yodtgw

12. See Part 1, “easyJet – simple and fast”

13. ‘Warmth’ – constructed from metrics including Relative Brand Warmth, Customer Satisfaction, and Customer complaints (see Part 1, “easyJet – simple and fast”)

14. ‘Strength’ - constructed from metrics including Marketing Contacts and PR Coverage (see Part 1, “easyJet – simple and fast”)

15. ‘Humidity’ - constructed from metrics including Conversion, Site entry and Site exit (see Part 1, “easyJet – simple and fast”)

16. ‘Rainfall’ - constructed from metrics including Cost of Search and Market Pricing (see Part 1, “easyJet – simple and fast”)