easyJet: Strategy Launch

  • Leadership development
  • In-person product

Our PLAN for the ‘Warmest Welcome in the Sky’

The challenge

easyJet changed the way people fly, making air travel affordable and easy. They created ‘generation easyJet’, a people-fuelled culture that goes way beyond cost and efficiency.

Their model has been copied by countless competitors, increasing customer expectations. Today, if a booking system is just three seconds slower than the competition, customers are 60% more likely to buy elsewhere!

easyJet launch presentation

Time for a new plan. But how can you engage an entire, mostly remote, workforce with a new strategy so they feel 100% connected and able to contribute?

easyJet: man presenting on stage

The solution

In short: a new story, a launch campaign, local engagement and individual action.

easyJet mock up images
The recipe? Simplify all of easyJet’s existing corporate messages. Nineteen key messages into three, a mountain of documents into just one slide; ‘Our Plan’ on a page.

Write a compelling and repeatable story that joins up people, customers and commercial strategy with purpose and values. Then tell it in different ways for different audiences so it’s consistent, relevant and inspiring, whether you’re an engineer, crew or HQ.

Then take the words and turn it into a ‘rich picture’, using images and metaphors to create a tool that becomes the backbone of the communications campaign.

easyJet map mock up

Follow that with a conference for 300 operational leaders to co-create functional versions of Our Plan that make sense to their teams, while simultaneously launching an animated version of the rich picture on tablets in crew rooms and on internal social media, so that the whole organisation hears about Our Plan at the same time.

And finally, embed it with ‘Our Plan in a Box’ – a toolkit for managers, packed with ideas, materials, films and cheat sheets to help them quickly turn this new story into goals with actions everyone can take every day, along with KPIs and mechanisms to track success. Easy.

The creative theme

Music creates the beat. It crosses cultures and connects the entire easyJet team. And as luck would have it, CEO Johan plays the trombone! So, we created an eye-catching, ear-catching theme for the campaign that avoided the usual travel or flying tropes. The launch conference was staged as a concert with Johan performing, and the audience dancing (at 9am!). Breakout rooms were designed as recording studios and the rich picture was built around the imagery of a music festival.

And the tone changed too – at easyJet, strategy is not ‘theirs to deliver’, it’s ‘ours to own’, hence ‘Our Plan’. It felt personal.

The result

Within two weeks 14,000 employees connected with the new narrative and felt proud to be part of it.

Within six weeks everyone had engaged locally and all teams had goals 100% aligned to the delivery of the strategy – a whole organisation focused on delivering five strategic pillars, together, as one team. At the end of Q1 and Q2 all strategic KPIs were tracking to plan. 

Operational communications adopted the Our Plan imagery and theme. And best of all, the organisational ‘chatter’ changed. People are using the language of the strategy to talk about how they contribute to the “warmest welcome in the sky”