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- [00:00]
A
Finding the right audience shouldn't feel like doom scrolling with Experian. It doesn't. Experian syndicated audiences help you reach holiday shoppers, car buyers and more across over 200 top platforms. With over 2,400 pre built audiences, there's no more doom scrolling. It's audience targeting you can trust. Made simple. Learn more@experian.com Adweek that's exp er I ian.com Adweek I do believe marketing is.
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B
About translation and really understanding what works in the market and how do you simplify and how do you understand and anticipate the needs of the marketplace?
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C
Hi everyone and welcome to the Marketing Vanguard Podcast. I'm Jenny Rooney with Adweek and I'm thrilled today to be joined by Kristen Lauria. She's the CMO of Wheels Up. Kristen, welcome.
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B
Thank you, Jenny. It's great to be here today.
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C
Well, it's great to see you. I'm excited for our conversation and honestly, like, I love the Marketing Vanguard podcast because it's really a chance for me to get to know people better and it's obviously also a chance for our audience to get to know you better and get to know the universe of CMOs that exist and all of the tremendous work that they're doing to drive their brands and businesses forward. So with that, I'd love for you to just share a little bit about yourself. You know, start with your career background and what got you to this role.
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B
Sure. I have a very unexpected career background because I started my career as an aerospace engineer early in my life and that's what I graduated with and spent a lot of time in tech and in big companies on the engineering side, but really starting to understand product and what makes a product work in the marketplace, and switched into marketing through a role at IBM back in the days of Smarter Planet. I'm dating myself here, but for those people who remember Smarter Planet because my ability to understand the technology and really translate that to the market, like understand the depth of knowledge coming out of research, how does it become a product and then how do you translate that into something that the market is going to understand? Which brings me forward into how I have built my marketing career. I do believe marketing is about translation and really understanding what works in the market and how do you simplify and how do you understand and anticipate the needs of the marketplace? So started out my career in technology, IBM pushed me into the marketing path. Spent a lot of time in almost every division of the IBM company for seven years in different roles in marketing. In different capacities. And from there I went to Cigna Corporation during the pandemic as their CMO and then a little bit in consulting and jumped over to Wheels Up. But my background is really all about translating what is the point of view, what is the deep purpose of a company and how do you take that and point that at new markets and taking brands and pivoting them towards growth.
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C
Okay, so how does that apply to what you're doing at Wheels up now?
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B
Great question. So very similar to many jobs. Let me go back to my role in Lotus Software and taking that brand inside of IBM and shifting it to IBM's social media play, if you will. Right. So that was the last remaining brand we had that really attached to the end user. And at the time it was all about collaboration. And collaboration was really shifting from content to email focus to this whole thing in the early 2000s coming out around social media. And how would you leverage that brand to drive new forms of collaboration and communication out in the marketplace? And so that was a really big pivot from IBM Lotus to IBM social business. Same thing in the healthcare space with Cigna where Cigna Express Scripts came together. And how did you take that brand and talk about health plans, but really pivot it to this broader market inclusive of Express Scripts to what's now ever north, their hundred billion dollar brand for health services. So that pivot. So flash forward to Wheels Up. A couple of reasons for coming over here. I always believe that CMOs should take a step away from. I always talk about positional and personal power, but those big opportunities and say, can you roll up your sleeves and pivot something else? Right. Say come over to Wheels Up. And this brand is about pivoting from private aviation to I would say Premier Aviation Solutions. And so the private aviation market has always existed around a flight and aircraft type. What you might hear about fractional models, and that's really about we have this product and who do we sell it to? Wheels Up a couple of years ago with our investment in Delta, and I'll say it's more than an investment, it's a partnership, is really about shifting to aviation solutions. And whatever the mode of transportation is, it's not always just one flight. So this combination of commercial of our private aviation solutions with our own fleet and then access to other group charter cargo through a company we acquired called AirPartner several years ago. But bringing that entire thread together to drive, sometimes we call it first mile, last mile, different ways to get to your destinations. And doing that through a membership model, not owning A part of an airplane, per se. Right. Whatever jet you need for whatever journey. If you're going an hour on a flight to Nantucket, that's one jet. If you're taking a business trip across the country, that's another type of travel. If you're going over to Europe to a small island, you can take Delta 1 over to London and a small hop on a private jet over to Ibiza. So really, really crafting this luxury market for private aviation solutions is a pivot and it's, it's setting a new market. And how do you take that brand to really drive a new market and absolutely become the leaders in that market?
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C
And so you obviously mentioned membership, you mentioned luxury. So this can be for high net worth individuals, this can be business executives.
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B
Yep.
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C
Okay. So it doesn't have to be just corporate executives.
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B
No, we're a mix. Right. So we serve many corporations as well as high net worth individuals. So we think of it as business and leisure travel. And oftentimes though, high net worth, it's a combination. They're often traveling for work and traveling personally as well.
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C
I'm curious about the membership model. So that's for the individual, but you could probably also contract with the corporation one model.
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B
And so for a very low fee, our membership starts at 200,000. You buy into the model and that fund that you put down gives you access to what I described, our owned fleet, our partnership with Delta, and also access to our charter market around the world. So it gives you global access and you can use those funds in any combination thereof. And with that fund that you put down, we actually have flexible pricing. So there's one model around what we call dynamic pricing and then we have another model around fixed price and then we allow the customer to choose which direction they would go in.
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C
So how do you think about it from building up your internal capabilities to make sure that your marketing organization is driving the kinds of outcomes that you need. And so obviously, I guess the first question in that is what are the outcomes? You know, what are you a CMO paying close attention to? It is a very unique market. So I'd imagine the KPIs and the things that you're paying attention to might be somewhat unique. And then obviously how are you building the organization to support?
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B
Yeah, so from a marketing lens, we spend a lot of our days on brand. But what I will tell you, it's not brand in terms of a product LED brand, not get the name out there all over. It's very similar to the work that I've done in the past. And what is the point of view of our brand? What does our brand represent? How do you build trust? So serving this very particular market, these are the most financially savvy people in the world. So how do you trust the company and how do you understand what it is that you're buying into? Right. This is not a small sum of money that people are trusting us with. Very similar to like financial advisors building the brand, what its purpose is, what its point of view is, and the trust in the brand is of utmost importance. The second thing that we focus on every minute of every day is the customer experience. So this brand has to be underpinned by an experience that's like no others and a differentiated experience. Right? So it's not only the aircraft and the physical embodiment of the experience, but it's the communication. It's people are paying to get their time back. Right? So every, I'll call it the golden thread of communication from pre and post flight, during flight, in between flights. And then even more important is the market that we serve. We like to think of them as the modern entrepreneur. There's also a community around this market and so it's a membership model and people are buying into the community. So what I was going to mention is we also have what we call our wheels down portfolio. So our wheels down portfolio gives our members access to a series of I'll bucket it into clubhouses and hospitality and also experiences and destinations. So our members get access to our clubhouses. So every year, for example, we do a massive hospitality in Augusta around the Masters. And this is a series of programming that the way I describe it, it turns a visit to the Masters into a luxury vacation where you have a place to go, a place to different types of programming that we bring in, from business discussions to entertainment, and a place to interact with your peers and the other members. We also do a series of hospitality where we exist inside of hospitality that others provide. So Monterey Car Week, many of our members are there. And this year we went there and we did a speakeasy inside of the Lamborghini house. And in addition, as our members go there, we offer packages and access and also a place for us to meet up with additional customers. So that's the hospitality. We also have partnerships with, for example, United Auto, so we spent 24 hours in Le Mans and we're there and our members have access to the paddock there. So several partnerships are very important to our customers as well. So this wheels down portfolio, I'm sorry, the last Thing that I will mention is this whole idea of what I think was termed gig tripping a few years ago and now it's extreme day tripping, but really enabling those journeys to happen. So it could be a trip to North Fork in a day or we had a recent customer go chase the Northern Lights. Started out in Seattle and we did a series of different ways that he traveled up to the Canadian Arctic. So those types of opportunities and crafting those solutions for our members are in the wheels down portfolio.
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C
What's the best day trip you've taken?
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B
It doesn't have to be really extravagant. I will say for me during the pandemic, I've done so many travels around the world because of IBM, right? And I said, you know, this is my time to really rediscover the United States. And one of my favorite places in the world is the Finger Lakes in New York State. Now this is not a place that I'm going to take a week off and drive nine hours. But you know, in a quick one hour hop from White Plains you can go to Lake Canandaigua. I saw Dirks Bentley at their amphitheater. You rented a boat for the day and then you go back the next day. And those types of experiences with your family are priceless. So that's one example. I'll tell you one other one that's on my mind. The Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina. So many people have not seen this. Right? And again, is it going to be a week long vacation for our market? Probably not. But a quick trip, that's fantastic to be able to do things like that. And you can name these all over the world, but those are two of mine that I've been focused on.
- [11:12]
C
I love that. So I have a lot of questions. One is, you know, you mentioned priceless, by the way, which we all know and love to be the tagline for MasterCard, for example. Do you do collaborations with other brands like that? Let's take a MasterCard for example, or an American Express. And it doesn't have to just be payments companies. But do you think about collaborations where there is an innate community that's built through their platform and then there's yours? And how do you bring them together?
- [11:38]
B
Yeah, we've had many partnerships in the past and we continually think through partnerships. Yet the credit card companies, there are lots of discussions going on. We mentioned the Delta SkyMiles program. So imagine if just a sliver of their SkyMiles and Delta and the reserve card members, we work very much hand in hand to be marketing and sharing experiences with them. There's other angles as well. Hospitality partners have similar thinking of Airbnb experiences and the experiences there's Inspirato we had a partnership with very early on but we constantly mix these up and say where are the next partnerships? And so we have many of them, many different conversations going on at the same time. There's one other one I was going to mention even retail. So one of the things we're looking at the high end retail outlets, brands if you will, also have VIP memberships. So there are several areas that we address our market through and many people know the whole sports area and the NFL and college sports and that's for initially but we've since ventured out into culinary as I mentioned, we're looking into retail, hospitality, motorsports, leisure and lifestyle type events. So all of these areas have their own versions of communities and members, whether it's a rewards program or not and it's, it's oftentimes a similar set of customers. So we all share back and forth and figure out these wheels down type experiences that we could do.
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C
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B
Yeah.
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C
And then you know, my next question goes to Obviously I do think that this can be debated, but whether it was always the case before COVID or certainly post Covid, you know, we're fully back to a world where I know brand marketers in particular are talking so much more again about experiential marketing and like the value value of experience and you know, the concept that people want to spend more money on experiences than goods. How are you seeing trends in that area impacting you? How are you monitoring that and what are the insights you'd share with other marketers?
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B
Yeah, it has been a shift back and a hyper shift back. So where many of the over the last 10 years much of the marketing was about digital and online, we're in a business that isn't necessarily going to drive the purchase decision in a digital way. Right. So in general, even prior to the pandemic, during the pandemic and now it is a relationship based business. Right. Which then also drives a need for experiential activations. But I would say that over the last few years, it has gone back to what we used to think of in terms of event marketing and experiential marketing in a big way. That doesn't obviate the need for the digital side. They work hand in hand. So we look at experiential marketing in two ways. The experiences that we can create and those experiences directly drive the business. So that goes hand in hand with private aviation, but also, as I mentioned, with Monterey Car Week, the experience and participate in. And so we do both. And I think the most important thing in experiential marketing right now for me is where are our target customers and our members going? And, you know, we talk about all these sophisticated KPIs. For us, we have a member base, so it's very easy for us to understand where are they, where do they want to be, and where are the next level of things they want to be doing. And that said, there's also a playback to all of the traditional things that we knew from Davos 24 hours in Le Mans, like all of these big presences, if you will. I'm seeing brands show up, as we did back in, I don't know, the early 2000s, 2010. But it's. It drives our business, number one, the experiential side, because it is what our members want to make time to go do. And our members in particular do want to pay for experiences. They want to pay for experiences and get their time back. But also it's how we market.
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C
Yeah. Well, then also, how are you thinking about? You know, you mentioned Davos, for example, and some other big events like where do you go to get visibility for the brand and the business where there might not be any?
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B
I think that's what I was touching on before. So this year we broke into motorsports and we did it through the endurance racing. So we sponsored a team and we were at Le Monde, for example.
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C
That's not necessarily for members. That might be for prospect.
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B
It's both. And so that's where. So this is where it's really interesting in our industry because it does create the demand. So our members see value when we go to those events that they were already planning because they're flying there. So how could we put together incremental value for them in the events they're going to? But also they're meeting up with what would be our prospects. Our prospects are there as well. So for us, the investment goes twofold from a member experience as well as, you know, a marketing acquisition, play the next one I will mention that's just always a phenomenal event is Monterey Car Week. We were at this'll be our third year coming up on an event called Cayman Cookout down in Grand Cayman. So again, all three of those experiences are both value to our members as well as value to our business.
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C
No, I love that. It's interesting because I guess a normal question would be are you a B2C or a B2B business?
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B
Yeah. So it's funny you asked me like in the beginning, what's the relationship between what I'm doing now and what I've done in the past. There are so many similarities and the complexity of what we do. We serve a very defined market, but we are B2B. We are B2C. Sometimes we're B2B2C on the corporate side through agencies, et cetera. So we have all three marketing models in play. And how do you find the right offerings, if you will, and the right solutions that it's not so segmented that we end up with a portfolio of 20 different ways that we serve those markets. And as I mentioned earlier, our signature membership works in all three of those spaces. So we are B2B. We are B2C and some are B2B2C and we work across all of it. And I've always believed as a marketer, what you really have to do is target. Even in the IBM world, many times who you sell to and who the ultimate end user is are two different audience members. But you have to market to both.
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C
Absolutely. How are you thinking about as you sort of move forward and you build upon your storytelling? Do you establish or do you lean into comfort? Efficiency, reliability?
- [18:16]
B
Yes. The baseline of any private aviation or aviation company is safety and reliability. That is number one. So that's, I don't want to say table stakes because the complication of that. It's everything we think about every day. So that is an absolute must. But everything else you mentioned in this space is as important. So naive care, you said comfort. We think of it in terms of customer experience, but really making every touch point seamless and every touch point on brand, if you will, to make sure that you bring out the best and you're talking to the customer. The one thing that we haven't talked about yet is this industry has to be customer centric. On steroids.
- [18:52]
C
Personalization.
- [18:54]
B
Personalization. Each member is unique and so that relationship driven business is really, really important, as is the customer experience. Anticipating the customer's needs of what's on the flight before they get there, are they going to need a meal and what happens when they get off the flight? Making sure that, you know, is the. That they either car service or rental car, is it plain side, is it right there so that there's no disconnect? And anticipating those needs and making sure they happen before the customer's asking for them. That is customer centricity on steroids. But I will also say in this case, I mentioned our new signature membership, really providing solutions that are what the customer needs in terms of the seamless travel ribbon, the seamless journey from end to end, regardless of type of flight, but also all the connection points thereof. Anticipating that and putting an offer together that starts there rather than starts with here's the airplane we have and here's what want to sell you. That is another shift that is so much like the work that I've done in the past. Being market in versus product out. And that is the epitome of what reels up is driving in the marketplace.
- [20:00]
C
How do you think about the sustainability conversation? I asked this because obviously this is something that a lot of brands were talking about, probably going back about five years. It feels like that conversation has waned a little bit. But especially in the case of brand collaborations, there are other big companies out there for whom being aligned with sustainable options, certainly in travel, is going to be important for them. How do you think about that? What's the conversation that you have around that and the positioning?
- [20:25]
B
We are constantly thinking about this in private aviation. I will tell you, I do think the conversation, when I think back to the pandemic and now I think it's become, you need to be thinking about it like before, it was being talked about all the time because people weren't talking about it. So I do think that corporations just see it as a part of what they need to be doing on an ongoing basis, especially in aviation. We have efforts around, you know, sustainable aviation fuel, but also at a very high level. I love to think about our offering in terms of this, right, that when you look at private aviation, it's really a jet for any journey and an aircraft for every mission is really critical to that because taking an oversized aircraft to go 30 minutes is a big piece of it right there. So we could talk about all these offsets, we could talk about all this other stuff which we are doing. But I do think being mindful of how you travel, when you travel is a big piece of it. So making sure that every customer has access to the right capable aircraft for the mission that they are serving is where it really starts. We do not need a heavy jet to go from point A to point B if that trip is a half an hour trip, a couple hundred miles. And so we enable that just inherently in what our offering is. It facilitates that. And we're seeing that inside of our corporate play as well, where a lot of these corporations own their own aircraft, but they know, you know, they're traveling from New York to D.C. with one person on that plane. So we absolutely can provide supplemental lift and supplemental options for them not to be taking those larger aircraft. So that's a big play for the corporates as well.
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C
That's great. Now, getting into some questions around you and as a CMO and your leadership style, what would your team say about you?
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B
Sure, they'd say a lot of things, but you know, it's. I go back to my early days on executive training and you always have your dominant styles and you use different styles at different times. I would say for me, during transformation and have enough experience, I'll say that I've done this many times. It's really about setting the pace and coaching. And what I mean by that is you set the vision and the vision is really important, but you got to ground yourself in reality and you got to roll your sleeves up and say, here's the vision and I'm going to be with you every day. As we enter that journ, my most important thing, I talk a lot about mentorship and the people who have pulled me through the system and the people that I got to learn from over the last couple of years. I have children, so maybe this is where it came from. But my mentors right now are the up and coming generation really helping me to think out of the box because I don't have the gut feel for the world of communications for the 25 year olds. And so rolling up your sleeves also helps you stay ahead of the curve, be creative and learn and push yourself in directions that you wouldn't have thought of on your own. I very rarely do authoritative and tops down. It doesn't work in transformation because you have to come to the table every day and say everybody here wants to be here and everybody here is working 10 hours more than they should be a week, 20 hours more. So now how can I really help everybody feel like a team, cohesively feel like we have each other's back and not be afraid to say, I really don't know what to do today? It is so big, it's so lofty. Where should I start? So it's really to me, setting the pace and then coaching. And I guess the third thing I'd add to that is it's okay for me as a leader to say I made a wrong decision there. And my team, I think is very comfortable, especially when it comes to leading brands. I joined a space that I didn't have experience in. Right. I bring to the table my experience. But if I make a decision on the brand and I say I want to go in this direction, I think my team's really comfortable saying, I don't agree. I think we should go in this direction. And it's really important to demonstrate those times when you say, no, you were right and let's move forward in your direction. And it just enables innovation and it enables creativity.
- [24:13]
C
Love that. As we are coming into 4Q25 and we're looking ahead to 26, what can we expect to see from wheels up?
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B
So we just launched our signature program. We're going to do be present at a few more events, but I would focus us on January. We are going to be at the AMEX Pro Am. We will be taking over the contestants lounge. So we will have a, a presence there for our members and for the contestants. We also be at Cayman Cookout. So those are two places that we'll be but really rebuilding the brand and continuing to facilitate the brand around this new membership that we have.
- [24:46]
C
Last quick question, Kristin. Who's next? Who's somebody that I should invite onto the podcast for an interview? This can be a CMO that you know really, really well or it can be somebody that you just admire from afar and you like the work that they're putting out in the world and you'd love to hear more from them.
- [25:01]
B
You may have already had them on the podcast. I would say there's two people. Lorraine Barber. Lorraine and I worked very closely together in IVM all the way through her first step out of IBM. So love where Lorraine has taken her career in so many different directions and just her style and personality. She's a presence. And the Next would be GenConnect at IBM. She has built an amazing career at IBM and she stuck with it through all of the different generations of CEOs. I think she's got a fascinating background and is one of those people that really just makes things happen.
- [25:33]
C
I will reach out at your suggestions. Listen, you ended up in aviation, I would argue.
- [25:38]
B
I know, and it was happenstance, but things happen for a reason.
- [25:42]
C
They certainly do. Well, thank you, Kristen. This has been a pleasure. I look forward to talking with you again sometime soon. And in the meantime take care and enjoy the rest of this year and we look forward to seeing more from you all next next. Thank you.
- [25:54]
B
Thank you Jenny thank you for listening.
- [25:57]
A
To Marketing Vanguard, part of the Adweek Podcast Network and Acast Creator Network. You can listen and subscribe to all of Adweek's podcasts by visiting adweek.com podcasts stay updated on all things Adweek Podcast Network by following us on Twitter at Adweek Podcasts and if you have a question or suggestion for the show, send us an email@podcastdweek.com thanks for listening. Finding the right audience shouldn't feel like doom scrolling with Experian. It doesn't. Experian syndicated audiences help you reach holiday shoppers, car buyers and more across over 200 top platforms. With over 2,400 pre built audiences, there's no more doom scrolling. It's audience targeting you can trust made simple. Learn more@experian.com ad that's exp e r I a n.com adweek.