Marketing with a cause

 

By now over 30 million of you have watched the recently launched WestJet movie that has gone viral in a big way.

 

Interestingly I have more people from other countries including the UK and Australia forward the link to me telling me to watch this amazing video.

 

What WestJet has done should be a lesson to many of us and it is a message I have been preaching for quite some time.

 

 

For many of us as business owners we are so focused on what the competition is doing, we forget to look at what our customers want. As a consultant in the real estate industry I would always ask my clients why they advertised in a particular periodical and I would almost always get the response “because that is where my competition is advertising”. Perhaps we give the competition too much credit. We may assume that they analyze their business investments in marketing and like the blind leading the blind we simply copy what they do.

 

WestJet, not unlike the Virgin empire have chosen to think strategically about where they invest their money. 

 

Companies that invest their time and energies in focusing on a bottom line that includes people and planet as well as profit are reaping greater rewards for their efforts. WestJet has always been part of those ranks but have elevated themselves higher with this campaign. Most executive teams would shy away from the concept of simply buying a group of passengers whatever they asked for on the camera... perhaps there was risk involved, but as with every progressive idea, risk is part of the equation.

 

WestJet has been consumer centric in their thinking since day one and have shown once again that they know how to win the hearts and minds of their current and future clients.

 

I hope that rather than wish our business had come up with such a novel idea, we are looking at it from the consumer’s standpoint and asking what marketing practices truly create brand equity?