UNITED AIRLINES Head of Advertising & Social Media, Maggie Schmerin on Mindshare vs Marketshare

Maggie Schmerin leads the global advertising and social media team at United Airlines where she's been for over five years. Her previous experience includes multiple years at Edelman where she worked on such brands as BlackBerry, Shell, Kellogg’s, Mars,  Proctor & Gamble and Samsung among others. 

Maggie has also been honored by Crain's Chicago Business, and named a 40 under 40 by PR Week. In this conversation with Lippe Taylor CEO Paul Dyer, Maggie gets into her career path including making the shift from agency-side to brand-side, leadership lessons, and the importance of mindshare over marketshare - all of this and so much more on today's episode of Frictionless Marketing. And now, please welcome, United Airlines Head of Global Advertising and Social Media, Maggie Shmerin. 

Here are some key takeaways from this conversation with Maggie:

Agency people - learn your client's culture. At an agency, it's an obvious prerequisite to learn as much as you can about your client's industry, products, competitors, numbers, etc. but what can often get overlooked is the importance-  of learning about your client's internal culture. Maggie has an agency background and can empathize from both the agency and brand side, and she finds that her most trusted agency partners are the ones who take the time and have the passion to truly understand United's internal culture. Learning how your client's company works, thinks, operates, and communicates can  substantially increase your level of intimacy with them. A pro tip is to sit in on your client's earnings calls if they'll let you. 

Related point: brand people, learn your agency's culture. The very obvious inverse of the previously stated point is that brands need to stay on top of everything their agency is doing, especially the work they're doing for other clients to really grasp what they're capable of. Mutual levels of familiarity between agency and brand can enable the kind of harmonious communication and understanding that ultimately lays the foundation for great work to be done. All of this begins and ends with understanding culture. 

Focus on mind share not just market share. When doing a competitive audit before launching United's recent major marketing campaign, Maggie observed an absurd sea of sameness within the airline industry; they all used the same colors, the same verbiage, focused on the same things and overall were indistinguishable from each other - the same went for other brands in the travel sector. When leading the Good Leads the Way campaign, Maggie knew that United needed to break away from the homogeny of not just the airline industry but the entire travel industry. She recognized the importance of mindshare vs market share and that United wasn't just competing with other airlines it was competing with the entire travel industry including hotels, rental cars, etc for the mindshare of travelers. Thinking in such a macro way was one of the reasons Good Leads the Way was a massive success - it was completely fresh and different and launched as an outlier in the entire travel industry, not just among other airlines.

Thanks for listening, don't forget to subscribe!