Profile: Tim Maples of Delta

Brand equals company plus positioning and advertising, right? Not if you’re Tim Mapes. Many credit Delta’s managing director of marketing with the branding of Song, the company’s former targeted entry into low-cost flight. But while he had a heavy advertising background, it was a stint in operations that really taught how to brand.

As a child Mapes knew his career direction. “I wanted to be in advertising from the moment I watched Bewitched: come home to a beautiful wife called Samantha, drink martinis with Mr. Tate, and fool around art boards,” he remembers.

He majored in advertising and worked at agencies before going to Delta in 1992 and becoming director of advertising in 1993. The results were … industry standard. “I presided over some of the most hyperbolic ad campaigns in Delta’s history,” admits Mapes.

Then he time running Delta Express and had an epiphany. Marketing had to be more than image and empty promises. “You go out to the field and see how hard ramp agents and pilots [and flight attendants] are working and you say, ‘We’re setting our people up for failure.’”

So when Delta started Song and Mapes became its second employee, he wanted brand based in understanding a customer segment, women travelers, and then organizing to delight the customers with style, entertainment, respect – and low cost. He wanted a revolution.

“I’ve been 28 years in the airline business, and it wasn’t anything any marketer thought we could do,” says Joanne Smith, Song’s former CEO, now Delta vice president of marketing. Early on she remember sharing with Mapes a cab trip to a meeting. She thought it was time to introduce the brand campaign to the line employees. “He said, ‘Let’s not show them any ads. Let’s bring our employees in and work on building brand culture.’ He was marketing from the inside out, building the culture that was going to build the product innovation.” Employees bought into the concept, became enthusiastic, and Mapes got these evangelists out in front of prospects in the context of their lives – serving food and drink at store openings, for example.

It was the right approach according to Paul Parkin, principal of San Francisco branding firm SALT and a veteran of brand consulting with Virgin. “Simply relying on mass communications to build a brand is no loner enough,” he says. You need to engage with people in many different ways and let them experience the difference.”

(Note: the above originally ran in Advertising Age last year.)