For GWP Brand Engineering, the essence of a brand, particularly for a start-up business, lies in the culture of the client. So when the Toronto-based agency met with the people behind Expedia.ca – a small group, but one that was highly passionate about travel – it was inevitable that their personalities would inform the online travel service’s platform, ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’
‘They had the energy of people who were fresh out of college and had never had a bad business experience in their lives,’ explains Bruce Philp, managing partner at GWP. ‘While Expedia.ca was the Canadian face of an already successful new economy brand, the fact is, it was a start-up, and the personalities of the people we were dealing with were so purely enthusiastic about the opportunity in front of them that they may as well have been betting their own money on it.’
A matching of cultures defines the working relationship between GWP and Expedia.ca: both are small companies with an entrepreneurial spirit. But beyond that, Expedia.ca’s fervour for travel and travel planning is mirrored in GWP’s own zeal for building brands from the ground up, which has resulted in a brand identity that is steeped in experiential joy. ‘[GWP] is a small company and we believe foolishly strongly in what we do,’ says Philp. ‘We work best with clients who are the same way; we have a hard time with cynical, professional marketers.’
Expedia.ca, a subsidiary of U.S.-based Expedia Inc. which operates Expedia.com, initially launched in 1997, but until recently there hadn’t been any Canadian-specific branding or advertising for the service; advertising was co-opted from the U.S. So GWP began with a clean slate in the summer of 2001 to give Expedia a Canadian face.
GWP already had a good track record for developing new economy brands, as shown by its work for both the virtual bank ING Direct (named one of Strategy’s Top Clients for 2003), as well as online grocery merchant GroceryGateway.com.
In addition, Expedia.ca’s director of marketing, Sean Shannon, had previously worked with key people from GWP during his tenure at Molson Breweries.
‘Having worked with them [previously] for a year and a half, they were on my radar screen,’ says Shannon. ‘It was very clear from the previous experience that they actually do what they say. And the final thing was fit: They were people I could communicate well with. We really have a true partnership.’
Working with Shannon and managing director Stuart MacDonald (formerly of Signature Vacations) – both of whom GWP partner and CD Philippe Garneau fondly refers to as ‘travel geeks’ – the brand engineers developed a positioning which focused on the merits of arranging travel for oneself.
Explains Philp: ‘It really began with getting to know them. The face of the company we saw had two big dimensions: one was that at that time, it was still part of the Microsoft family and that brought with it an extreme technical competence. The other side of the equation was the human side. You take those two things – the Microsoft sensibility and the human face – and you get the ultimate travel machine. It works, but it’s motivated by joy and passion instead of by zeroes and ones.’
The next step, according to Garneau, was to take that passion and express it as the sense of accomplishment one gets from a do-it-yourself project done well.
‘[In the advertising,] we used music as a mnemonic device, since it had to both express their character and the kind of unbelievable enthusiasm they had for the idea of travel, and more specifically, the jazz you get from being able to plan a trip. Because really, it’s a kind of emotional foreplay; you do it yourself, so you don’t have to worry that the person across the desk is going to screw up.’
Regular contact is a key factor in helping strengthen and foster the relationship between GWP and Expedia.ca. ‘These guys are e-mail crazy, which is fantastic,’ says Philp. ‘We end up talking with these guys multiple times a day. [There’s never a moment] where we don’t know what’s on their minds. They manage to extract a point of view from us on pretty much anything they want instantly. They’re really into spontaneous communicating.’
Indeed, something is working for Expedia.ca. While the travel industry as a whole has faced innumerable challenges over the last couple of years – just after GWP’s branding campaign for the company went to market, Sept. 11 happened, not to mention this past year’s troubles with SARS and the war in Iraq – Expedia.ca has made great inroads in Canada. The site has been breaking earnings records: The latest results show that gross bookings on the site have more than doubled, rising 113% year-over-year for Q2 2003.
‘It’s been an interesting and fascinating year,’ says Shannon. ‘We’ve been sort of the beacon in an otherwise perfect storm. We’ve had stellar results, and, as a total team, we’ve weathered extremely well.’
This is the final instalment in a five-part Strategy series examining client/agency relationships.
