Industry profiles


■ LEADING BY EXAMPLE A lesson in the power of digital brand building TOPIC.


With a meagre marketing budget, no tangible product and little experience, Virgin Galactic has achieved the near impossible by engaging punters to pay for a space flight. Pip Brooking reports


Imagine that you’re trying to launch a company from scratch, without much of a marketing budget, and you want people to part with $250,000 of their hard-earned cash years before they get to even sample the product. Impossible? Apparently not if you’re


Virgin Galactic and you’re offering people the chance to experience a flight into space – something that most were convinced would remain the stuff of movies for decades, if not centuries. Even still, the scale of Virgin


Galactic’s success to date (the first space tourism flight isn’t planned until next year) is impressive and almost entirely reliant on the “word of web”. Will Whitehorn, Richard Branson’s


right-hand PR man, and now the space company’s president explains: “Most of the money we had went into building a website that would work and which we could take bookings off before we even knew if there would be any bookings. It was all done with a press conference and a good website.”


ENGAGING THE CUSTOMER BASE Whitehorn adds that within 24 hours of the launch the website had 2.5 million direct hits. In the first six months, 60,000 people had registered their interest. Crucially, Virgin Galactic had 350 paying customers and $45m in the bank – enough to fund development of the craft that would take them into orbit. Customer service and retention is an


interesting conundrum when you can’t yet deliver what customers have paid for, so Virgin Galactic again used the power of the web to keep its customer base engaged. It launched Spacebook,


www.mandmglobal.com “One of the


great things with social media


Branson: heading a trusted brand


about the same time as Facebook took off, to create a community around the project and keep dialogue flowing. But this was more than just a gimmick. Virgin Galactic used the discussions to build on its offering. Firstly, it found out that nobody would pay if they couldn’t experience weightlessness, so the team redesigned the craft to allow it. Secondly, it discovered a huge buzz around the idea of the “silence of space”. “We hadn’t thought of it as a sales


and the web world is that you can test direct with the market- place”


done it if we were Joe Bloggs Aerospace. Without a really good brand, there would have been no trust, no deposit.” Even the Virgin investment board


was “rightly cynical” about the launch – Whitehorn had to leave the board to pursue the project. But in the end success has perpetuated the Virgin effect. “It inspires other marketing teams in the Virgin Group. It’s pretty cool that we’re building a spaceship. One of the great advantages in Virgin is there is always one product out there at the cutting-edge.” Once lift-off is achieved, the next challenge will be to expand the scale of its customer engagement work. “When you’re looking at the wider market, economies of scale means the price will come down,” Whitehorn says, likening the current price level to the equivalent $89,000 the first air passengers paid in 1939. “But I doubt we will turn to traditional advertising. Good


marketing is about a good product, a good brand, then good communication.” Maybe seeing the marketing world


from 50,000 feet is what all brand managers should do to see the true potential of brand building online. ○


Why it works Scalability: With limited expense


tool, but one of our Spacebook fans mentioned it. In fact, our customers have pointed us to a good bit of marketing,” says Whitehorn. “The great things with social media and the web world is that you can test direct with the marketplace. A lot of marketers worry about the web; few realise what a rich source of information it is.” Whitehorn had one crucial ingredient


to make this work: trust. “We were lucky with this project, we had this brand called Virgin and when we asked people to “trust us”, they did; we couldn’t have


For more digital case studies go to mandmglobal.com


upfront, the digital strategy saves money for when the business is up and running


Openness: Virgin Galactic was


prepared to let its consumers shape both product and communications


Trust: The launch, with the time lag, could not have worked without it


Bravery: Innovation, from the path to launch and in the product itself, marks this out as different


M&M Q2 2010 41


Will Whitehorn president, Virgin Galactic


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