36. How to lead your team through turbulent times with Cathay Pacific CMO

Why customer and employee empathy is the key.

Edward Bell, General Manager Brand, Insights and Marketing Communications at Cathay Pacific, has an impressive track record in strategy and planning roles for global ad agencies Ogilvy and WPP. Ed has also been a CEO, and he’s worked client-side as Director of Marketing Communications for Adidas in Greater China. His experience and wisdom shines through in this episode.

In this episode, we discover:

• How COVID-19 has dealt airlines a significant blow - and the importance of revenue diversification;
• How the marketing team has adapted and stayed resilient during the turbulent times;
• The increasing role of psychology and behavioural economics in marketing – and how this has played out in some of the recent campaigns for Cathay Pacific; 
• The upsides of the pandemic - in terms of the marketing team trying new things, expanding their in-house remit, flexible working, and launching a new Cathay lifestyle brand;
• How planning cycles have changed the way they do budgeting and led to the emergence of agile ways of working;
• The data dashboard Ed has built with partners like Google & Skyscanner to gather the travel intent data they need to predict an uptick in purchasing behaviour so as to maximize their marketing and media investment; and
• How Ed is building a modern marketing team based around three core teams.

As always, we have detailed notes available for this episode. To access these, head to our website, look out for this episode and download the PDF summary notes of our conversation with Ed, with all the tips and strategies laid out in an easy-to-read format. 

Enjoy the show!

References

• Cathay Pacific - Arm up and let’s fly again.
• Cathay Pacific - Life Elevated with Cathay.
• Cathay Pacific - Fly Confidently with Cathay Care.
• Cathay Pacific - Till We Fly Again.
• Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow.
• Malcolm Gladwell - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
• Raja Rajamannar - Quantum Marketing: Mastering the New Marketing Mindset for Tomorrow's Consumers.
• Under Armour - Under The Armour: Michael Phelps.

Contact Ed Bell

• Find Ed on LinkedIn or via email and mention you heard him on the podcast. Find out more about Cathay Pacific. 

Contact Growth Generators

• Find out how Ty and Growth Generators can help you design and build a modern marketing team that drives growth using our 3-stage framework for marketing team transformation.   Follow or connect with Ty on LinkedIn.

If you enjoy this episode please remember to subscribe so you get each new episode as it drops each week to get more tips and insights to build a high-performance marketing team, tell someone about the podcast who you think may benefit, or leave us a rating or review!

This episode was produced by Dylan Todd and edited by Lewis Hallam.