INTERVIEW ALEX HUNTER
“WE MUST REMEMBER THAT BEHIND EVERY CLICK AND EVERY CALL IS A HUMAN BEING” Alex Hunter is a branding and customer experience expert and angel investor. He previously served as the global head of online for the Virgin Group, overseeing the Virgin brand’s global digital strategy in its entirety, as well as Sir Richard Branson’s personal digital strategy. Recently he created Attaché - a new kind of travel show, curated for the experienced travellers. Alex Hunter is a renown business speaker on the corporate circuit and appears all over the world at major industry events such as ad:tech, SuperReturn, Future of Web Apps (London, Dublin, Las Vegas & Miami), Thinking Digital, Marketing 2.0, CIO Connect, iStrategy, Tech4Africa, Marka and Internet World. He will be the keynote speaker of the autumn edition of the Entrepreneurs Days, organised by the House of Entrepreneurship on November 29th.
Can you tell us more about your academic and professional backgrounds?
“After attending secondary school and then business school in the UK, I returned to California where I took up the role of associate director e-business at what is now AT&T. My interest in technology and customer experience soon led to a fascination with the web, a platform that I felt could be the perfect intersection of my two passions. After working at several large multi- nationals in technology roles, I caught wind of Virgin’s plans to start an airline in the San Francisco area. I pulled every possible string to get an interview there and eventually joined the team in the mid-2000s. I joined in the inception phase of the airline, when there were just a handful of employees rallying around a great idea. I stayed with Virgin America through its successful launch in the late summer of 2007 whereupon I was asked to take up the role of global head of digital for the Virgin Group based in London, responsible for the group brand digital stra tegy. With several satisfying and exciting years at Virgin under my belt I decided to branch out on my own and help companies all over the world tackle the same kinds of problems that I’d immersed myself in throughout my career. I’ve been doing that ever since and love every moment of it.
90 MERKUR Novembre | Décembre 2017
You catered to worldwide groups including Volkswagen, Twitter, L’Oreal, Pepsi, GE, Ubuntu, Shell, Bosch, Voestalpine, GSK and IKEA. Tell us more about your greatest achievements?
“I have had the pleasure and great fortune to spend time with some of the most interesting companies and people on earth. I’ve enjoyed understanding their challenges and discussing their opportunities. But I think the achievement I am most proud of is participating in the launch of Virgin America. I joined the team when it was just an idea on a whiteboard; no airplanes, no licence to fly, just a very small group of people united by a single mission - to create an airline people love. At the time, the mid-2000s, the US domestic airline market was not at its best, the glamorous jet setting days of the 50s and 60s were a distant memory. We worked hard to build an in-flight experience that was like nothing the US traveller had ever seen. One could argue that the inside of a Virgin America airplane, with its mood lighting, high speed internet, TV screens at every seat, and various other innovations would have been sufficient enough to put us miles ahead of the competition. But we quickly realised that stepping on board the airplane was the last step in the customer journey; they had to go on the website, find their flight, pay for
it, go to the airport, check-in, go through security, and board before they could experience a Virgin America airplane. But a passenger could easily have stepped onto the airplane and said, ‘Yeah, nice shiny airplane, but it took me an hour and forty-five minutes to check in, you’re terrible.’ And they’d be right. So instead, throughout the design and construction of Virgin America, we imagined that the inside of the airplane was empty. That forced every single one of us to think about the Virgin America experience in its entirety, about every customer touchpoint in isolation. Did it reflect the Virgin America brand? Was it sufficiently different to the competition? Did it live up to the promise we were making with the inside of the airplane? If not, start again. That way we had a scalable brand experience that meant that no matter how a customer came to us, no matter how they experienced Virgin America the first time, it would be consistent. That was, for me, an entirely different way of thinking about customer experience, brand and product curation. It was an education for me.
You worked for the biggest mass-market brands. Are there any common grounds between all their stories?
“In many cases when a company is born, the founders spend a long time figuring out who the company is, what it stands for. They stick to this steadfastly and it guides every decision they make in the early years. But companies grow, revenues rise, staff levels
What does digital transformation mean to your business? ●
Keynote speaker: Alex Hunter Branding & CX expert, former head of digital for the Virgin Group
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29 November 2017, 18:30, Chamber of Commerce, Luxembourg
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In English with a French translation
Info: www.entrepreneursdays.lu