How Delta CMO Tim Mapes is marketing the travel experience

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The CMO discusses marketing during uncertain economic times and the holiday meltdown at Southwest Airlines. For Delta Air Lines, having an outsized presence at a technology trade show makes perfect sense.

The world’s third largest airline by revenue, which flies 200 million passengers a year, made several tech-focused announcements at CES, built an activation with Starbucks and used the four-day conference to strengthen brand partnerships.

“[There’s] 345 of the Fortune 500 companies here. Many, if not all, of those companies are our customers,” said Tim Mapes, Delta’s chief marketing and communications officer and a 30-year veteran of the airline. “There’s something rich about everybody being here for this really tight window of time that just makes it a little bit easier, and therefore a bit more productive.”

Adweek caught up with Mapes after Delta CEO Ed Bastian unveiled plans for free Wi-Fi for SkyMiles members and introduced Delta Sync, a more tailored travel experience for passengers. Mapes discussed marketing during uncertain economic times and the holiday meltdown at Southwest Airlines: “None of us liked seeing what happened. We want people to think travel is great, travel is fun, travel is easy. And if any one of us as carriers reminds the world that that’s not the case, it’s not good for any of us.”

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Adweek: How will you use free Wi-Fi and Delta Sync as a way of marketing to your passengers and growing SkyMiles members?

Mapes: The key part is what would lead somebody to choose us when they have other airline brands to choose from. And there are different dimensions of that. Brands are emotional as well as rational. What is enabling in terms of technology and connectivity is the rational part of that. But the other part of it is our ability to better know and, therefore, better serve you. It’s not just important that we know you as a SkyMiles member, but that the flight attendants, flight crews, and pilots do, and are able to provide greater service. Part of our challenge is how do you make people feel one in a million as opposed to one of a million.

What’s fascinating to us is we’re seeing the average number of devices connected to Wi-Fi per person, on some of these test flights, at three. Whether it’s connectivity in terms of work or personal things, it gets absorbed and gets utilized in ways that now we’ll be streaming with much greater bandwidth.

And do you set goals where you can say, ‘Okay, this is going to drive X number of new SkyMiles members?’

The average number of SkyMiles members out of 10 passengers on a Delta plane right now is around four, which is a huge growth opportunity. When we know you are a member of the SkyMiles program, which is free to join, and when you join, that’s what will enable access to the free Wi-Fi, we’re then able to more directly interact with you via your text or your email.

We have a preferred method of communication to then say ‘hey, do you have the app? Do you have a Delta credit card? Or are you a Sky Club member?’ There’s this opportunity to provide things that we know you would value: could be more legroom, it could be mileage incentives and bonuses. That will be much richer when 100% of the addressable audience on these planes is in SkyMiles.

What have you learned so far here at CES? How’s it going to inform your marketing this year?

The biggest thing we’re watching right now is the extent that the people on the plane are an addressable audience unto themselves. The question then, is of paid media, earned media and essentially house channels, our owned media, and how much money do you need to pump through paid channels? And there’s obviously the blend of brand messaging versus performance marketing and what makes the cash register ring. Clearly, digital and accountable forms of media are already going that way.

[Delta Sync] changes all of that, because virtually 100% of the people in the plane become not only an addressable audience, but you have some baseline level of affinity. So upsell and cross-sell promotions are exponentially more likely to be in play, and therefore get greater amounts of our resources.

Talk about the importance of having the Starbucks/Delta activation here at CES as part of your marketing strategy. Is that for brand loyalty? Is it for recognition?

What has been fascinating is, as we make these announcements, a number of other companies are saying, ‘do you need a partner in this protocol, or in that space, or, our company would have an interest in talking to you about this aspect.’ And all of this content richness will play a part in what we believe is more membership than loyalty. It’s really how we bring to life things that are transcending travel.

The Starbucks example, the linking of those two accounts, we thought we’d get a million in a year, and we got a million linked accounts in 16 days. So what it points to is not just Delta partnering with other travel brands, it’s Delta partnering with lifestyle, culturally relevant brands, that take us out of the airline space and into what brands should represent.

Travel is always an indicator of the economy more broadly. With the potential for tough times, how are you planning? How are you communicating with your team about what might be ahead?

There’s $300 billion of unmet travel demand as a result of Covid. There’s a certain amount of pent-up demand for the restoration of travel. So we feel very good about the demand that we see because we take bookings 330 days out. What we’re excited about is travel is one of the things people reward themselves with and find ways to prioritize. An economic recession, from our team’s standpoint, has the potential to disrupt all that, but so too does the reality that in times of trouble, communication is more vital.

We did 10 lessons learned through Covid that we shared with our board of directors. The number one was you can’t over-communicate during a time of crisis to your own people, to your customers. All of that communication has to continue, whether the news is good or bad. Losing $100 million a day, which we were at one point, the demand for comms was greater than it would be in a time of rosy blue skies.

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What did you learn from the meltdown over the holidays at Southwest? And, again, how do you communicate that with your team?

We don’t want to have the prettiest house in an ugly neighborhood. So as an industry, it’s not good for any of us to do poorly, operationally, or let customers down.

It also furthers our belief in the value of the people of Delta Air Lines and what they do every single day. Whether you’re a pilot or a flight attendant, or a [reservation] agent, finding ways to not let meltdowns happen from an operational reliability standpoint, but also being safe, clean, and on time. It’s a high capital, high labor-intensive industry, [you need] the ability to reinvest in all of those things, your people, your technology, your fleet, your facilities, which Delta did all of during Covid.

Who are some of your marketing heroes? Whose work do you look up to and say, ‘that’s good.‘

Brands that bring magic to life through people, to me are the ones I admire the most because we understand how hard it is. What Four Seasons does is brilliant. St. Regis is certainly great. A lot of people talk often about [whether] people are willing to pay more for brands that demonstrate truth to their values and consistency in their actions. There’s evidence that that is absolutely the case.