The idea that content marketing can nurture the relationship between a brand and its customers is one that Lionel Benbassat, head of brand and marketing at Eurostar, has been exploring for years. His fail fast approach has seen him experiment with starting Eurostar’s own record label and launching a magazine (initially unbranded). Ahead of his 12 June talk at Arena’s seminar Growing Brands in a Digital Age, he sat down with Jon Wilks to discuss his journey so far, and his determination to keep a startup, entrepreneurial spirit at the heart of a major brand.
You’ve been at Eurostar for 10 years now. You must have seen some considerable change.
Yes, massive change. A change to the organisation, and a massive change to the culture. I’ve been there 10 years, but we turn 20 at the end of this year. When I joined we were not a startup in terms of size, but in terms of spirit we were. Between the day I joined and today, the business in general has grown.
What have been the biggest changes?
The biggest change was in operations – HS1, in 2007, and moving to St Pancras. And then, as a business, when we moved from being a European joint venture to actually being a limited company; from exploiting the high-speed line commercially, to making money from it. From a business perspective and an organisational perspective, that’s quite a radical shift. So I’ve been through all of that. It’s been quite fascinating to see such a business evolve, year after year. When I joined, I thought I’d only be there for a couple of years.
What has kept you there?
All this change! All the activity that I saw in the business, both in terms of growth – something like 7.5 million travellers to 10 million today – and an evolution in what I had to do in the business. As I said, we were very much of a startup mentality; it was a time when we could see how to make the overall business progress in many ways. I joined the company at a time when we were looking to develop online communications, especially in the French market where there was pretty much nothing to drive traffic to Eurostar.com, which was only a two-year-old site at the time. So that was the first opportunity: starting from scratch on something that hadn’t been done. And then we had all of the opportunities after 2007 – selling the fact that the three-hour journey from London to Paris had been reduced to two hours and 35 minutes. I think the story of Eurostar has always been like that, with a lot of landmarks that have made the whole journey very interesting.
You’ve talked before about being ‘entrepreneurial’ in your approach. How do you maintain an entrepreneurial attitude in a company with the size and stature of Eurostar?
Well, that’s a very good question, because I think the spirit of the startup is something that we want to keep. The spirit of a startup is one of trying – and accepting sometimes that you’ll stumble and start again – trying to find the right way. I think this is something that we’ve done and that we keep on doing. It’s important to find time and resources to test new things. We always find ways to give flexibility to the staff, and there’s always space for proposing new ideas and starting to implement something. It’s kind of a ‘test and try’ culture, and we aim to keep that in lots of the activities we do: you’re better to try something new than stay with the status quo. Rather than being a company, we are a movement, essentially, in everything we do.
So, as head of marketing and brand, do you try and stay as hands-on as possible? Are you trying your own ideas, or are you relying on a strong department?
I think it’s coming from everyone. It’s coming from me, because I’ve had to push my team to act like that and share their ideas, but I think everyone needs to do that. It’s an everyday approach for everyone on the team, and I include myself in that.
So you’re an advocate of the notion that good ideas come from anywhere?
Completely. They do come from anywhere, and a lot of the time, they come from the customer. So we need to listen to the customers and look at how we can turn that remark or that feedback, into something that will make a difference. We also need to listen to the customer-facing staff, because they are the ones who actually deliver the service. I’m very much an advocate of that, and I think the management of a service company is an inverted pyramid. Top management needs to serve the customer and the customer-facing staff, because ultimately they are the service.
How does working with an agency fit with your agile and startup mentality?
Okay, so we’ve got resources that we need to allocate to make sure that whatever we do is as efficient as possible, but we always keep a pocket of that for testing new things. That could be new ways of applying technology, new approaches to planning that allow us to test what’s out there and how people react, and knowing there’s a risk – that the money might be better used if it were invested to support a more classic approach. But sometimes you have to look at what’s out there that can help you achieve your objectives, whether they’re sales activation, pure ROI, or more brand-building and brand KPIs. So this is what we do in all our campaigns with our media agency [Arena]. When we do sales activation, we do it through programmatic, but we also try to see how we can link mobile into that, and how we can try new ways of buying media.
So you’re looking to your agency to help you innovate.
Completely. I think we’re pushing the agency to innovate. It has to be a relationship between the client and the agency. Knowing that we want to do that, they need to propose and adapt new ways of buying media, and they need to keep testing to do that.
I’d like to talk about brands. We’re told that people love brands these days, and that brands need to become publishers to create content to keep people interested, but isn’t there a point coming where people are going to get cynical of all this branded content? Do people really love brands?
I don’t know whether people love brands, but people love what’s relevant to them, wherever it comes from. I think people are now beginning to embrace the idea that these things can come from anywhere, and there have been some pioneering brands doing things you’d not expect of them. They’ve done it very successfully, so they’ve kind of paved the way for other brands. In terms of content, I’m obviously thinking about Red Bull. In terms of technology and ways of approaching the industry, I’m obviously thinking about Apple – a computer company that changed the music industry. So I think we’re open to that now. It’s not ‘I love the brand’ – people don’t really care about brands – what they care about is something that touches their daily life. And this is the major challenge for me: how does a brand, especially a brand like ours – which at the very best has a weekly relationship with its customers (we are in touch with 95% of our customers every 18 months) – build a regular relationship? It has to be through content, and it has to be something that’s relevant to your customer base, as well as being relevant to you as a brand and what you stand for. People begin to recognise that it’s quite natural for you to do this, or say that, or act how you act. So yes, I think people are open to good content.
So it’s content first, brand almost irrelevant?
Yes. I don’t think people watched Red Bull content because it was Red Bull, at first. Now they do. But at first they watched it because it was just brilliant. It had a good way of capturing sports, passion and craziness, and people were amazed by it. Now Red Bull has become a label, which is the end of the cycle. If people love that brand, it’s because they know that what they’re going to get from it is really, really good.
Red Bull is an interesting one, because it built the idea of great content and being a publisher into its business from the very beginning. It might be argued that people see Red Bull these days as a content provider before they think of the drink.
Completely. Because this is something that was part of its DNA, and that it has built over the years. It’s something that takes time. You cannot do that in a year, or a couple of years, unless you have a massive amount of money. So if you actually want to do something and be recognised for your ability to enrich peoples’ lives through content, you need to take the time to grow that relationship. It doesn’t happen overnight.
Do you think it’s possible to retrofit that relationship? Is it possible to become known for that kind of content as a brand; can you build that, or does it have to be in the DNA of the company?
It’s possible to build it, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it. But I think it’s harder, and it’s where you need to be really relevant to people. It needs to stem quite naturally from what you do as a core activity, because otherwise people would have a hard time reconciling your approach with what they know of you. So it has to be very close to your core activity to begin with. And then you can get further away, but that’s why it takes time… you need to gain people’s trust with your ability to do something else really well. So, yes, I think it’s possible. But is it easy? No. Will every brand that embraces this approach succeed? No.
But Eurostar has a good starting position. For me, it’s a company that is tied to journey and adventure, so it lends itself to great storytelling.
We certainly have a good foundation, because we serve three amazing cities that people will always love and want to explore. And we’re expanding that with new routes across 2016, and Marseille in 2015. There’s a lot of very interesting things to build out of that. But we started [working on this interesting content journey] some time ago. We’ve been testing it over time. We created events where we took everything we felt represented the best of London and brought it to Paris for a few days, and we created a lot of content around that. That was the beginning for us. What we couldn’t foresee at the time was how to take that kind of content and create it on a regular basis, and take it through media to our audience. But that’s where the market is much stronger now, technologically and strategically. We’ve got the means to create content that we can take to people on a regular basis.
Another thing we did was to create a music label, a bit like Red Bull, back in 2008. We released an album, we released compilations, and really went through the whole journey as a proper music label. It was a very exciting experience, but it became difficult to reconcile it with the brand. Even if people got it – that great music equals London, and Eurostar goes to London – in order to get people believing [in what we were doing], we needed access to proper music channels, which we didn’t really have then. So we’ve experimented with that kind of thing, in a very entrepreneurial, startup way. The record label was a great experience that didn’t have a lot of success, but we tried, and we learnt a lot about what we ought to be doing.
I suppose being able to hold up your hands and say, ‘Okay, time to move on to the next idea’, is important, too.
Exactly. Knowing when to stop and move on to something else. What is very important in a content approach is knowing that we’re making things for people, rather than for us. I think that where brands really need to be bold is in creating content that is not self-centred, but really something that is done for the interest of the customer. I think it’s very difficult to find the balance, and very difficult for brands to say, ‘I won’t shout so much about me, and I will let people go on the journey themselves and reconcile it with the brand, rather than try to feed them every single value.’ We need to have branding, obviously, but we need to have content that can be content on its own, without the branding.
We’re at an interesting point, aren’t we? A common thing I find myself saying to our clients is that good quality content is customer-centric, and that the brand is just an enabler for that content. The growth part for a lot of brands is getting comfortable with that idea.
Exactly. And it’s recognising that growing your brand doesn’t mean plastering your logo and advertising messages everywhere, but letting people embrace you through content and fall in love with you, rather than forcing them to love you. Again, this is something we started doing when we were creating content for the French market. We created a magazine that covered all the good stuff to do in London. It was a quality magazine, distributed in cool restaurants and cool places in Paris. For the first year, I didn’t even brand it on the cover. I didn’t want people to look at it as advertising. The brand was on the first page, in the masthead. So people were taking it because it was about London. It was quite easy to do that, but I also think it was quite bold. People said to me, ‘why aren’t you branding Eurostar on the cover?’ I said, ‘I’ll put the brand when people are accepting of the content.’ We branded it on the cover after a full year of distributing it for free, without heavy branding. But I think the magazine was recognised for the quality of its content, and people were taking it not because it was Eurostar, but because it was great content that happened to be produced by Eurostar.
What’s interesting about that, too, is that you’ve avoided the trap that a lot of brands fall into, in that they chase a lot of the sparkly new stuff. There’s a new app here, a new device there, but what you’ve done here is accept that the magazine is fundamental to the Parisian café culture. In that context, the magazine is never going to be bettered.
And that’s somewhere where you have to find a balance. Rather than innovating for the sake of innovation, you need to find a way to support innovation that’s really grounded in your audience’s behaviour. So the magazine is very simple, and having an app might support your overall approach, but what we want to avoid is simply jumping on the next thing so that we’re the first to use it. For me, innovation is not about being first. It’s about looking at what’s out there that can actually help the broader scheme. Being first may be bold, but it’s easy to fail. We’ve done it, but it’s about testing things. Most of the time, when you’re first, you don’t do it properly. So it’s better to look at what’s out there and really think about how it serves what you want to do, because people really don’t care about which was the first brand to do something. What they remember is who did it the best. Being first is completely irrelevant from a customer’s point of view. The iPod was not invented by Steve Jobs. There were companies doing that before. Nintendo’s Game Boy was not the first pocket game. So it’s not about being first; it’s about who gets it.
Lionel Benbassat will be talking at Growing Brands in a Digital Age, Arena’s breakfast seminar to be held at the Havas Café, 60 St Martin’s Lane on 12 June.