Boredom, as it has been said, can be a great catalyst for action and this couldn’t have been truer for Shashank Nigam, founder and CEO of airline marketing blog-turned-consultancy SimpliFlying. Shashank, who cheerfully admits to having a long-standing love affair with planes, says it was all thanks to the winter he spent in Boston while working for tech start-up Endeca that he hit upon the idea of starting the blog in 2008.
“It gets really cold and dark at around 4pm with nothing to do in the winter,” he recalls. “I’ve always liked planes and airlines, so I decided to do some research to see if I could find an intersection of my two interests – airlines and branding – but I couldn’t find anything on the Internet. There was information on everything from startups to Coke. There were airline consulting companies that focused on the technical side of things – operations, network planning, flight operations and scheduling – but none on branding. So I thought, ‘Why don’t I just start a website and write articles analyzing airlines and brands?’”
Shashank Nigam
Finding his groove
Nevertheless, he soon realized that there was something quite unique about airlines and airports that set them apart from other industries. “After four or five months, I noticed that airline branding is really unique to the industry and you can’t apply generic principles of branding to it. Generally, with a can of Coke, your brand engagement is two minutes. With Starbucks, it’s anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. With an airline, it can be anywhere from two to twenty-four hours depending on how long your flight is.”
Based on this observation, Nigam wrote Six Steps to Building a Swashbuckling Airline Brand (PDF), a white paper that examines the six unique factors that contribute to an airline company’s brand. However what he wasn’t prepared for was the response to the paper. “It got published by Interbrand’s Brandchannel.com as the featured white paper of Summer 2008. I was really surprised because they generally publish papers written by PhDs or retired industry veterans. It was just as well that I didn’t state my age because I might not have gotten published!”
Taking the plunge
Buoyed by the response to the paper, Nigam started looking at his blog in a new light. “At the time I was still working full-time in Boston and doing this on the side. I decided that maybe I should take myself more seriously and sent the white paper to a few airline folks I knew, like Mike Barclay (CEO of Sentosa and former CEO of SilkAir) and asked them for their feedback. It was generally “Hey, very good ideas. I’ve been thinking about these theories for years and you’re making a lot of sense. But it’s professor speak – you can’t really do anything with it. Bring out the tactical side of it.”
His lack of experience in the industry was also another factor that convinced him to come up with a tactical strategy that would show how social media could drive airline branding and customer engagement. However it wasn’t an easy task. “Back in 2008, social media was just emerging and people were really skeptical about it. MySpace was dying and Friendster was at its peak. They didn’t know if social media was another fad that would come and go. I had an uphill task convincing airline companies about using these new technologies to engage their customers.”
Entering start-up mode
Nigam quit his job in Boston in Dec 2008 returned to Singapore to incorporate and work on Simplifying full-time. “I had $20,000 in savings from my one and a half years working at Endeca. I told myself I had to break even before the money ran out or I’d have to return to the job pool.”
Luckily for him, the company broke even in nine months and even better, it did so using less than $10,000. Although Nigam was running the company all by himself, he made sure to assemble a board of advisors to guide him. Among them was Donald Schenk, President and CEO of Airline Capital Associates in New York.
“Don has been my angel investor and mentor since Day 1,” says Shashank. “He was one of the people I sent my white paper to and I actually took the bus down from Boston to see him on the day it reached his office. I saw that he had highlighted half my paper and made notes, and he told me that he had been thinking about those ideas for a couple of years. His company dealt with the network and operational side of things, not branding. So I helped them with their existing plans and headed up their brand strategy division, and they in turn helped me with my startup.”
Getting a break
But the real breakthrough was to come when he attended his first conference in the February of 2009. “Luckily, I managed to get a press pass because I couldn’t have afforded the $4,000 fee otherwise,” he says with a laugh. It turned out also to be his baptism of fire as one of the keynote speakers backed out at the last minute, leaving the conference organizers scrambling for a replacement. “I had a presentation ready and told them all I needed was to plug it in and I could go up there and present on airlines and social media.”
Not only did it end up being the highest-rated presentation in the conference, it also doubled up as his calling card. “That was what got the conference organizers to call me again and again. Not only that, there were CEOs and senior-level executives in the audience as well, and I managed to get admission into meetings when I didn’t even have an offering.”
Given that he was just blogging at the time, this opportunity eventually enabled him to branch out into offering consulting services to airline companies.
Today the company, which counts Turkish Airlines and Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) among its clients, offers brand strategy, customer engagement and social media consulting and training services. SimpliFlying.com was ranked among the Top 2 aviation blogs in 2009-2010 and its Twitter site is among the Top 5 most influential for airlines. Headquartered in Singapore, SimpliFlying has offices in New York and Toronto. The latter, which opened in June 2010, focuses exclusively on airport branding and airport customer engagement, a new service offered by SimpliFlying.
The road ahead
“One of our biggest challenges right now is staying ahead of the game,” admits Nigam, who jokes that his current address is “Seat 1A or 2A because that’s where you’ll find me most of the time.” The company is currently working on beefing up its product offerings and is planning to launch four products this year, with one of them being customer engagement tools for airlines. “Consulting is about giving companies what they want. But what we’ve found out is that a lot of the times, many of them don’t know what they want. So we want to offer companies something like Microsoft Windows where they just plug in the product to get it up and running. With our customer engagement tools, airlines just need to pay a subscription fee and they can start using them.”
Advice for local start-ups
For those planning on launching their own start-ups, Shashank has just one piece of advice: just do it.
“SimpliFlying is my third start-up. I had two earlier ones which failed so I can speak from that perspective. I think that local start-ups tend to focus a lot on plans, paperwork and strategies. I’d say just do it. If you make a mistake, get up quickly and learn from it,” he says, adding that companies shouldn’t agonize over coming up with too detailed a social media plan. “This doesn’t work because social media is agile and you’ve got to keep moving. The other thing with social media is that if you plan too much, it would have changed by the time you execute it.”
Shashank will be leading a live webinar on location-based marketing for airline loyalty programs on January 28. You can also follow SimpliFlying on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Image credit: gringer
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