Meeting customer needs – Learning from Kell Ryan

The story behind the huge success of Ryanair – which has grown from a small Irish airline with 5000 passengers to an international carrier with 200+ planes, 900 routes, profits and with 58m+ passengers is a lesson to us all.
How have they done this?
A clear vision that is easy to articulate seems to be the starting point – A low cost airline! This vision is then applied with a mix of innovation and inventiveness on one side a hardnosed approach to cost control on the other. The benefit of this simplicity is that customers understand the offer very clearly.
The next point is to hire talented staff and get their buy-in with shared rewards (options schemes) and to train them into the way that the airline wants to run. The staff is mainly young – in their late 20s and they bring with them their energy. They are located in some 30 centres across Europe, so they incur no hotel costs, all returning home every night.
With this mix of vision and operational simplicity, the airline has met two of the most important needs of the customer – anon time airline that provides the lowest fares. There are no frills and everything beyond the basic service of a “bus with wings” is charged extra. This results in some 20% of the revenue coming from ancillary charges.
What else does the airline do to meet the needs of customers? Actually the focus is very clear – it is to bring down the cost of international travel – that is it. The response to any further questions on this matter are simply to see that most other airlines that try and provide full service offers do not make money and that the number of airlines that lose money is high. Ryanair is one of the few airlines in the world that makes money.
In addition to ensuring staff retention strategies, the airline has also taken steps to retain common sense and kept a continuous watch on costs. So staff helps to clean the aircraft, load the passengers and run the cabin services. Seats are locked in place to reduce maintenance charges. There are no sacred cows – so if something needs to be reduced, charged for or changed the airline will do it.
For example – they got rid of lemons from gin and tonic. This saved on time and cost and the passengers did not miss it. They have introduced on-line boarding now – so that takes away queues from airports and reduces costs further. The charge for luggage is now being copied by other airlines.
The management and the teams stay focused on costs and ensuring they do everything they can to be the lowest cost airline. But having said that – their staff are not badly paid – so it is not in this where they make savings – recognising that cabin staff do need to be rewarded and to find the right quality of pilots also takes money.

One of the breakthroughs for the airline was the rapid growth of the internet. This has enabled the airline to innovate in all manner of ways from on-line sales, ancillary bookings of car hire, hotels etc., through to now online check-in. The senior team were creative in the way they arranged to buy the website developers. They had had two professional quotations, one from a Dublin firm and another from a London firm. Both were thought to be too expensive. So they turned to a group of 4 high school students (doing their A levels) and paid them in free tickets, some cash and subsequently for two of them - jobs in the company!
In summary – the business is run on a “keep it simple and straightforward” basis – where all the staff and the passengers know that the basic offer is to fly from point to point at the lowest cost. This simplicity has turned Europe into a single continent, connecting 500m+ people at affordable prices. Through this, people are taking weekend holidays, jobs and buying second homes.
Throughout the growth of the airline - one of the other qualities they have shown is the courage of their conviction. Without hesitation they absorbed the Southwestern airline model, pushed for second tier airports as way of cutting down on airport costs and ensuring better time keeping (keeping away from busy airports, went for 100% web based transactions, charged for luggage, have now gone for 100% web based check-in and so forth. They were bold to go with A level students to develop such an important part of their business.

In meeting the core need of their customers they have shown the focus on staff retention, inventiveness in reducing costs, focus on the core offer has kept them from being complacent and are important lessons for how one delivers strong marketing programmes.
This message of simplicity and boldness is a very powerful one in entrepreneurship and management and therefore I will keep away from the frequent times in which the airline courts controversy.

Understanding the needs of the market – Learning from Ryanair

Tuesday on October 27th 2009. See www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk

Kell Ryan, the recently retired marketing Director of Ryanair has kindly agreed to speak to the audience of Enterprise Tuesday on the 27th of October 2009. Kell is a highly experienced marketing professional, having worked in the airline industry for many years before joining the team at Ryanair.

Ryanair has been a great success as a low cost carrier. It has brought benefits to many people beyond price reduction. People can take short term jobs in other countries; get short week end breaks, host hen nights and parties in all manner of cities, bringing tourism wealth from those who have to those who can benefit! If we want to learn to think about marketing, customers needs and having the courage to make new rules in the market place – we need to look at how one of the more successful companies does it.

Kell Ryan has agreed to tell us about the early days of Ryanair marketing, their innovations and how they value both acquiring and retaining customers through meeting the key needs of customers. Importance of customer retention, Impact of the Internet, Ancillary revenue /activity, Innovation on costs, Business model, Simplicity of Operations, Branding /Marketing and that Price is King !

Kell is charming and you will learn from him the hard nosed lessons you need to take away about how to be innovative with marketing. These lessons will generalise to other industry sectors. I can’t wait to hear from him. I hold the Otto Monsted Guest Professorship at Aarhus School of Business in Denmark and it is only possible for me to even consider such a post and to deliver on it through the growth and development of Ryanair.

Understanding customers needs – The story of Viagogo

As we run into a brick wall of uncertainty in the world of entrepreneurship – I can remember the last time there was a kind of melt down. It had been caused by dangerous over-speculation on the web. I had been told – it’s not cash flow and customers – it’s about the number of clicks and eyeballs!
Well – 8 years later only a handful of companies have made money out of clicks – Google being a star examplar. In the end they too have to be measured by cash flows. What a relief for common sense.
So in the lecture by Eric Baker from Viagogo – a product of Harvard, Stanford, McKinsey, Bain Capital and Silicon Valley it was such a relief that there was so much common sense and a starting point that acknowledged “no customers = no business”.
Viagogo is an on-line ticket exchange business and charges 25% for its service. It holds no inventory of any kind and gets the cash upfront from the transactions. In other words the business makes a good margin and generates cash in providing affordable ways for people to exchange tickets.
So what is the marketing story.
1. Eric has a great personal background in terms of the education he has received. He also gained experience of this kind of business as an employee of Stubhub in USA.
2. He assembled a fabulous board of advisors. Not only is this a source of advice and route to money, but it provides excellent “brand association” by demonstrating the quality of the company he keeps. This helps to open doors, creates an illusion of size and provides huge levels of credibility.
3. Identifying the new trends. More and more people go online to buy tickets rather than queue in shops and at the venue itself. So the credibility of being able to exchange tickets online is established by the new market trends and behaviors.
4. There are an increasing number of other online exchange sites – such as eBay, so the format is easier to explain to consumers.
5. In addition to getting alongside well respected Board members, Eric did early deals with Soccer Clubs like Manchester United and Chelsea to be recognized as an efficient and “official” place for fans to exchange tickets, basically thereby undermining the touts who hang around outside stadia.
6. Eric was clear that his business solves a real problem for people who want to buy tickets. They want secure, reliable service where they know they can sell unwanted tickets and on the other side people want to be sure they are buying the genuine article and not being sold a counterfeit.
7. Below this level of strategic thinking about marketing Viagogo has all the internal disciplines and tactical marketing tools it uses to generate awareness about itself. This includes getting feedback from customers and making sure you stay close to their needs, adjust and adapt your services and products as you grow.
So the big question is why and how an American came to relocate to the UK to start and grow this business? Eric loves sport, learnt about the way this business operates and spotted the gap in Europe. He relocated to London and the rest is becoming history! He has chosen to be a Global entrepreneur and is chasing global dreams.