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 Diploma

Module 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.

70.00% 70.0%

62.30%
60.00% How important do you feel 60.0% How interesting do you find
[brand measurement] is for [brand measurement] for the
50.6%
50.00% the brands you work on? 50.0% brands you work on?

40.00% 40.0%
35.10% 36.4%

30.00% 30.0%

20.00% 20.0%

10.4%
10.00% 10.0%

2.60% 2.6%
0.00%
0.00% 0.0%

Very Important Fairly Important Fairly Unimportant Very Unimportant Very Interesting Fairly Interesting Fairly Uninteresting Very Uninteresting

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 interesting
Fairly interesting
Fairly uninteresting
Very uninteresting

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

Very important
Fairly important
Fairly unimportant
Very 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”)