How Modern Marketing is Enabling Delta Air lines to Revolutionize Travel – EP2

Hello everyone. Welcome to Marketing, art and Science. I'm CMO advisor show host, tech correspondent Lisa Martin.

And I'm so thrilled to be hosting this new weekly show that's really gonna explore this fusion of artistry and science that today defines modern marketing. On each show, my guest and I are gonna dissect this ever evolving landscape where each insight really opens doors to fresh opportunities for success. Today's guest is none other than Alicia Tillman, the CMO of Delta Airlines.

And to say Alicia has an impressive background is an understatement. Let me walk you through it in the next minute or so. As I mentioned, currently the CMO of Delta Airlines, but she brings so much great B2B and B2C experience to the marketing role and to brands in general.

She's a very dynamic c-suite leader with you can believe it, with over 20 years of experience in global marketing, sales, customer success, strategy, operations, and digital transformation in both public and private companies. She's a leader with proven success in optimizing marketing's role in the commercial achievements of business, including SAP where she completely restructured the entire marketing organization and built this ecosystem of partners and cultural influencers to scale the brand. 5 billion during her leadership.

She's now at the helm of one of the world's largest airlines. I'm sure many of you are Delta Flyer Sky Miles members. And like I mentioned, she brings this really unique mix of B2B and B2C marketing and operating executive expertise and board experience.

Please welcome Alicia Tillman to the program. Alicia, great to have you. Thank you so much for having me today, Lisa.

I'm so excited to be here. We're gonna have a great conversation over the next 20 plus minutes or so. What we're gonna do is really talk about how modern marketing is enabling Delta to revolutionize travel, which is what we all want.

We're gonna do that by kind of breaking that theme into four subtopics. The first is the about phase. We're gonna learn about Alicia.

She just came from the stage at South by Southwest 2024. We're gonna talk a little bit about that and the huge impact that Delta Airlines made there. Um, even in the, the noise of entertainment and tech companies we're then gonna be talking about the MarTech in action at Delta Airlines.

What does it look like? How does it enable pilots, gate attendants, flight attendants, customer service to really deliver that personalized passenger experience that we all want? Thirdly, we're gonna talk about emerging technologies.

There's some very cool things Delta is doing with 5G for example, AI that's really going to drive this connectivity that we all want, whether we are, uh, down terra firma or in the air. And the last section of this show is called Fail to Fab, and that's gonna be a segment where Alicia is gonna be talking about a marketing ex initiative experiment campaign that didn't go so according to plan and what they were able to do with data and science to completely transform that into a very favorable and fabulous marketing and passenger experience. Okay.

With that said, Alicia, you were just on the stage a number of times at South by Southwest. I was so jealous. I wish I could have been there, but I wanted the audience to know something that you shared with me from, from the Wall Street Journal CMO today.

And guys get this, they said the hottest spot of the weekend didn't come from a tech or an entertainment company. It came from 99-year-old Delta. Is that awesome?

Or what lines to enter its multi-story lounge and grab this vintage style swag that I would love to get my hands on that they were handing out. The lines were around the corner for days. Alicia, talk about South by Southwest, the customer experience at this 99-year-old history organization created that was so impactful to the audience.

Well, we live by the saying, go big or go home. So we really wanted to bring Delta. This is the first time that we were going to activate Delta at South by Southwest.

Austin is such an important market for us. We're continuing to grow our presence. We've been growing significantly year over year and south by, I mean, it's, it's just such a beautiful convergence of so many life experiences, be it music or film comedy, interactive, which is the business aspect of South By.

And when we think about the evolving nature of the consumer, these worlds are all colliding and consumers today, they wanna invest in brands that have this ability to bring all of these experiences in life together. And so it felt like the perfect platform for Delta to activate. And so Ed b, our CEO, he headlined the keynote stage just talking about the evolution of Delta over the past few decades.

And then our experience was a, uh, two story lounge that we built. And we wanted to bring the same level of experience that so many love when they fly, uh, with Delta into now and experience on their journey. And so we created this lounge experience that was only open to Sky Miles members, though you, you did have the ability to sign up for a Sky Miles member on site.

And, um, over the few days that we were there, we welcomed over 5,000 Sky Miles members that had the opportunity to not only interact with, uh, our products and the experience that they've come to know and expect now in this lounge experience in the middle of South by, but we also had our people there. Um, there were so many Delta greeters that we had at the entrance and throughout the lounge experience, and it's really our people that make Delta as special as it is. I love that.

You mentioned two words I wanna pivot on and that's evolution. And people talk to us about your evolution. I mentioned to the audience in our introduction that you are an expert in B2B and B2C marketing.

I mentioned SAP of course. Now we're talking about you as the CMO of Delta. Talk a little bit about your ascent to the role and your journey to the role of the CMO and what excites you about being a leader in these modern marketing times To be able to have, uh, experience in both B2B and consumer.

You rarely find that oftentimes you sort of go into a segment or into a particular function in your sort of pegged as that, if you will. But, um, my ability to sort of, uh, lead marketing at the helm of, of both one of the largest enterprise B2B companies in the world with SAP and now the largest airline in the world, um, with Delta. And then previous to that, I spent 11 years at American Express.

So also a very, very significant both B2B and consumer brand. I feel very fortunate. I have always had this, um, this unbelievable curiosity and desire to sort of take really kind of complex, um, ideas or ways in which you operate almost sort of like if you think about it as a Rubik's Cube, your ability to solve something.

Um, and the the reward that comes with that Companies, one of the biggest complaints often that they have internally is we do so much and our value proposition is super complicated. We have so many products, we have so many services. The beauty in that, and I think of which marketing is at the helm of is how do you actually take what I think is the, the beautiful nature of, of complicated value propositions and distill it into something that's both relevant and understandable Yes.

To the consumer and use it to help drive business success and customer loyalty. And when I had said early on in my career that that's what was appealing to me, um, I had great sponsors and mentors that said you need to pursue a career in marketing. 'cause that's really what marketing is all about.

Yeah, I love that you're speaking to my heart that be able to take and dissect the complex and make it digestible, understandable, relatable, personalized is something that speaks to me as well. It's so important to be able to do that. I love though, looking at orgs like Delta 99 years young, as I mentioned, massive along the way, digital transformation, but also cultural transformation.

Something that I read about Delta that I love is that for the fifth time in recent years, it's been recognized by the fast company as one of the most innovative companies on in the world, taking spot number two. This is huge for an organization that's been around so long. First of all, 'cause Fast company recognizes organizations that are really transforming industries and shaping society through innovation.

Talk about Delta's appetite and what you are doing to really drive the, the cultural and digital transformation that are necessary for that superior passenger experience. Well, we're humbled by the recognition from Fast Company. They often, uh, recognize, um, almost kind of startup organizations.

If you see the companies that predominantly take up, um, the, the awards in Fast Company, they're startup, they're organizations that have been in business for less than 10 years. And here you have nearly 100-year-old Delta being recognized as one of the most innovative companies in the world. And we're moving into our centennial year next year.

And the beauty of of how we have our brand rally cry is keep climbing and keep climbing emerged from some really dark periods of Delta many years ago. And while at times we said, okay, we've climbed out of that, let's now pivot to a new rally cry. We realized that we were never gonna do that because keep climbing is more symbolic to this idea that you really can never stand still and in a world of choice and change and evolving consumer needs and how loyalty sort of shifts in the requirements of that, we always have to be entrepreneurial.

We always have to be thinking with fresh ideas, modern ideas, relevant ideas. And I spend a lot of time in my role really sort of studying often the changing dynamics of consumers because we have to be able to stay relevant. We have to anticipate customer needs.

We have to be sure that we're delivering product and membership benefits that are really going to in fact drive loyalty for life. And, um, and the understanding that you're never going to stop climbing. Yeah, you may have to sometimes climb out of something, but it's also about how to kind of stay ahead of change and, and also, you know, be part of leading change at the same time Leading change.

I love that. Keep climbing obviously. I think that's a metaphor for life as you're talking about that.

I think we could all use that in our Christian lives as well. What's your favorite before we wrap up this kind of background about section, your favorite passenger story that just shines a light on Delta its objectives to support the customer passenger throughout their journey and to help them keep climbing? Favorite story?

Well, I have many, um, I'll I'll say two things. I mean, first off, whenever I, um, am meeting someone new and I tell them that I work for Delta Airlines, 10 out of 10 times, Lisa, immediately that person wants to launch into a story, uh, about Delta. And they're always fantastic.

It's usually a story about incredible experience, um, that they had had with a product. Yeah. Or with one of our people.

And it's always about our people. And I'll, I'll share one story that, um, we, we recently showcased at one of our leadership events. And anytime we have an event ed fashion, our CEO, he always pulls out an email and wants to share the contents of the email that he read, which is usually about a customer wanting to share with us the just incredible experience they had with one of our people.

And this particular story, um, was a very, very senior executive, um, in the film industry. And he was, he was sitting on the plane and, you know, he pulled out his laptop to do some work and then the meal service came. So he took his laptop and he put it in the seat back pocket while he ate his meal.

And I think you can maybe figure out what's gonna happen here. Well, or time. Yeah.

He forgot about his laptop when we landed. They, he deplaned he had a quickly and he had on his mind, he had a very, very quick connection to make. So he had a run multiple gates and in fact he described it as what felt like a two mile run from one gate to the next, um, in Minneapolis to, to catch his connecting flight.

And when he sat on the new flight, that was minutes from taking off, he realized he had forgotten his laptop on the previous flight. And within two minutes of him recognizing this come running onto the plane was the pilot from his previous flight who at the end of the experience was walking through, saw the laptop peeking out of the seat back and said, oh my goodness. Quickly found where he was going next.

And this pilot proceeded to sprint nearly two miles, and they both described Wow, to try to meet that flight to give it back to this passenger. And here's a pilot, you know, who didn't know who he was. He knew him as simply a customer of Delta.

Yeah. And I tell you, Lisa, this is just one of countless examples we have of our people going above and beyond. And so, so much that this customer wrote a letter to Ed and said, find this pilot and recognize him.

And we had the opportunity to actually do that on stage during this leadership event. I love that. That is huge and fantastic.

I wanna, that's a perfect segue into topic number two, which is MarTech in action. Talk about the marketing technology stack that you have and how it enables pilots to do what was just done in that scenario, or gate agents or flight attendants or customer service to really personalize that passenger experience in, in good times and challenging times. It's such a great question because listen, we live in a world where customers expect personalized experiences.

They're choosing brands that know them, speak to them, and are going to deliver an experience that just sticks with them and is so memorable. So we have a lot of, um, you know, the number one, you've gotta recognize the importance of that. And I, I don't want to jump into the technology before saying technology is an enabler of a mindset and what you believe needs to happen, and there needs to be a really strong process that surrounds any technology that we have.

And so we have a very healthy tech stack that is, is, is comprised of both industry leading platforms as well as some custom built solutions that we've designed as well, so that we can have this very seamless, highly personalized experience. So for example, um, you may notice even in flight, the flight attendants are carrying, you know, what looks like a handheld device. That handheld device is armed with, um, a tremendous amount of passenger information that passengers have shared with us, but also information about milestones.

So for example, if someone is just about to fly, um, their million miler or they're celebrating a birthday, um, or they perhaps shared with one of our agents that they're flying on their honeymoon, we feed all of that data into the devices that our in-flight staff is carrying with the intention. And we train them on ways in which they can enable this data. And it can be everything from a personalized note to welcome someone, you know, if they're a Delta 360 member, um, oftentimes they'll be personalized notes from either the flight attendant or even the pilot and certainly if they're celebrating a birthday or a milestone event.

So there's technology that provides that information and then we of course train our teams on how best to deliver that. There's so many other aspects of, of technology that exists as well that that truly span the entire travel ribbon as we would say here. Um, underlying all of this is sort of a seamless platform that kind of connects that entire experience from when you're searching to your booking to your in-flight post-flight, or even touch points along your journey as well.

There may be this, there's kind of a, a really strong tapestry of technology partners that we use to partner to, to help enable that, but it's all pulled from a really consistent foundational le le layer of data, if you will. Yeah. That helps to feed that sort of seamless, um, and very connected journey that, that we have across the travel ribbon.

The, the con connected part is, is critical and it's very, you just did such a great job describing what we want this webcast to really deliver to our audience, which is the fusion of the science, the data about passengers, their experiences from searching to booking, to infl experiences, to landing, et cetera with the artistry. That is what those enabled employees can do with the data to make that experience even better and more relevant. I love that.

What a great hybridization of, of artistry and science that Delta is actually delivering. Yeah, and, and I'll say just a couple things to sort of build on the, the art and science approach a bit, the art piece in terms of how we think about it in marketing, it's really, I mean, we help to shape the mindset. Um, you know, it's, it's the creative and these sort of personalized experiences that we know we wanna deliver to our customers.

And it's everything from in marketing and particular targeted media and email campaigns that we look to build, to interact and engage with our customers. And in order to do that, the science piece really revolves around this data centric approach that we have. And so it's data that enables us to target more effectively so that we are in fact appealing to this idea of personalization.

And personalization in the way we think about it has a lot to do with relevancy. So the more relevant our content is, the more effectively our customers engage with it. And it's a very strong, um, ingredient in our ability to not only anticipate customer needs, but to also create loyalty.

And I spend a lot of time here talking about how to really drive loyalty and there are certain things that are associated with it. Number one, you've gotta be consistent. You've gotta make sure that as you communicate with customers, you're doing that consistently.

And data helps to inform that and our technology helps to deliver it. And then number two, you need to make sure that the message that you are communicating is in fact connected and relevant enough so that it is in fact meeting those sort of requirements around personalization that customers have today. And that's another way in which let's say the science or the data aspect of it is the most relevant.

And then it's really then, you know, down to our superpower, which is making sure that our people are really accessing and using both the art and the science to really deliver that kind of core strength. And as we would call our superpower, which is just this highly authentic and genuine experience that's anchored in technology and data, but also delivered by what we feel are like the greatest people on earth, which is what we feel we have at Delta. I love that authenticity is so critical no matter what the person is traveling for, the group is traveling for that au authenticity.

Being genuine is just, it goes so far and it seems like that's part of the superpower at Delta as well. I wanna move into our third section here as we wrap up. And that's looking at some of the emerging technologies.

I mentioned some of the lauding and the honors that Delta was, uh, recently recognized, uh, with at by Fast Company. Another thing that it was recognized by, um, is its wifi revolution that's working to ensure that travel is connected. I think we all have this expectation when you've talked and I've talked about the personalization, the relevance, the connectivity, but we just need to be connected whether we're on, we wanna watch a movie going to our honeymoon or vacation or our birthday trip, or it's a work trip and we need to access documents in the cloud and that sort of thing.

What I, what I really value about what Delta is doing here is it's really carrying out this industry leading commitment to bring this fast wifi that's free. Huge word there, presented by T-Mobile to all of its entire global fleet. And so this is what you guys are working on doing here is connectivity at, at, at a really scale that we haven't seen before.

And from, from what I've read, the technicians, the tech experts at Delta have really navigated this extreme inflight complexity connectivity wise to distribute satellite signals to customers so that as they move about the aircraft, as the aircraft moves about the globe, they're connected. Talk about the technology at a high level that's driving that and some of the emerging technologies, maybe it's ai, maybe it's 5G, that are really catalysts towards making this, this connected experience a reality. Things that we realized, um, a long time ago are what are these, what are these gateways, if you will, that enable people to feel at their best or to feel like they can be the most effective, most efficient self that they can bring forward?

And wifi is, is probably, especially when you're flying, it is the one thing that's necessary to be able to kind of help achieve this, this feeling of efficiency and effectiveness as much as possible, especially when you're traveling on business. And so we, we took this approach and we introduced it at the early part of last year that said, you know, what, if WiFi's the gateway, what can it potentially unlock? And so we said we're gonna give it away for free, because for us that is, um, it is what enables us to unlock what we would say is personalization at scale.

The only requirement is you need to sign up to be a Sky Miles member, but signing up to be a Sky Miles member enables us to personalize content to you in particular. And so, you know, we're in process still of rolling out free wifi across our entire fleet, um, you know, beginning to focus on not only finalizing all of our domestic fleet, but then also beginning to support it internationally as well. Yeah.

And then when you unlock Sky Miles through the introduction of free wifi, it then unlocks really unique, um, and special content that we've curated with partners like T-Mobile only for those, um, that have signed up for free wifi through Delta. And so T-Mobile, you know, the types of subscriptions that they offer to Sky Miles members. We also have a Paramount Plus partnership, and Paramount Plus is enabling access to special content that they have produced.

And then you have New York Times games, Atlas Obscura, resi, we have all these beautiful partnerships. Walmart Plus is one of our newer partners. Fantastic.

That, um, if we can give you wifi, then we can give you this sort of unlock Yeah. Into content personalization, which is something that is top of mind for consumers is give me something different, give me something unique, give me access to things that I can otherwise not get access to unless I'm a customer of Delta. And so that's the real thinking behind it's appealing to customer needs.

Yeah. And giving them something unique that just appeals to them, um, in ways that we know they're most interested in. I love that.

And how technology is really a catalyst for that experience of, of really driving the unlocks. Last question in this section is, what are some of the emerging technologies, Alicia, that you're eyeing next that you think are really gonna impact the, the employee experience as well as the passenger experience? Yeah, so I, I mean, it, it it, it wouldn't be a conversation on emerging technologies if I didn't talk about artificial intelligence and gen generative AI in particular.

The use cases around that are definitely still emerging. And Delta has had a really long history of leveraging ai, machine learning chatbots across various facets of our operations that work in support of delivering customer experience as well as operational efficiency. So there's some newer predictive models like Next Best Destination as an example, where we are looking at employing machine learning algorithms to really analyze a customer's travel history, their preferences, their booking trends to be able to predict or suggest destinations that a customer is likely to be interested in next.

Because you think about it, I I can speak to my own experience when I'm trying to figure out, you know, where to take my next vacation. We spend countless hours researching or talking to friends or family. Yeah.

But based on my history and what I've, um, prioritized in past travel destinations and kind of looking at, um, similar, uh, offerings by destination to be able to serve up recommendations using, um, predictive modeling that is fueled by AI and machine learning. These are amazing. Yeah.

Things that we can think about offering and talk about really leaning into personalization at scale, driving engagement, driving incremental revenue. These are all just fantastic ways for us to connect with customers at a much deeper level. Lisa, and you know, oftentimes I think people fear some of these emerging technologies that they're going to, they're gonna be replacing, um, human interaction.

And it's not the case in, in the way we see it. It's about how do we augment and, and make the experience, um, more meaningful by being able to help travelers more than we maybe have the ability to have helped them in the past by leveraging these technologies, which is really exciting for us. Exactly.

And you're shining the light on how emerging technologies like AI and gen AI can be utilized for such amazing positive use cases. And I think the world needs to hear more of that. Last question for you and final, final section, sales to fab, share a story, if you will, Alicia, of, of a marketing initiative that went awry that you all saw, looked at the data and actually transformed into a huge positive Last year, we made some changes to our Sky Miles program.

And the goal of that was really to improve the experience of our most loyal customers. And when we rolled out these changes, our members quickly let us know that these were not, um, they're not expected changes. And it, it really felt like an erosion in a lot of ways of their trust and their loyalty in terms of the things that we changed.

And so we had thousands of letters, Lisa, from members that we had received over a really short span of time. And so we said, you know what, let's go through and read every single letter. What are the challenges to help inform what we want to readjust as a result of this?

And so we scanned every single letter we, we we really took to heart. I will say this is an example where the emotion or the art of you if, if you will, of thinking really needed to play center stage here. Yeah.

Because all the data would point us to your clubs are overcrowded or you haven't differentiated enough across the tiers because we relaxed a lot of things during covid as many companies did. Right. And so any data model would point you to a lot of the changes that we made, but what it didn't allow for was the emotional reaction.

That is also a big part of how you make decisions in business. And so as a result of that, we applied a lot of emotion against the data and we recalibrated and we made some really necessary adjustments and we were really transparent in our process and our approach and how we thought about this and how we worked to sort of in, in the next round of what we decided to do. We exercised a fair amount of both data and emotion this time around.

And I will tell you customers applauded it. There were still changes that people didn't like, but on the whole, they understood it more. And they definitely felt that we responded more emotionally because that's how our customers reacted to the change.

Yeah. And so they felt as though we operated more with our hearts when we went back and looked at this the second time. And that was rewarded quite significantly from our customers Data plus emotion.

What a great concept. And obviously what you were able to do there, leveraging the technology and the human side, which is I think how most folks should be thinking about ai, engine AI as them coming together to deliver this great experience is just an understatement to what Delta has done culturally to transform digitally, to transform and ultimately to listen to the voice of the passengers that are it's bread and butter. Alicia, thank you so much for joining me on the program today.

It's been outstanding hearing Delta's story. I will never look at Delta the same again. I will look at it as a, as a technology company that fuels personalized, uh, experiences with transparency and connected experiences.

We thank you so much for your time being on the show. It's been great to have you. Thank you.

It's been great to be with all of you today. Excellent. We wanna thank the audience for watching.

This is Marketing, art, and Science. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We'll be back next week with a new show, Steven, then.