How Cathay Pacific Built a Global Employee Advocacy Program

This week Neal is coming to you from Japan, and he’s talking to Dennis Owen, from Cathay Pacific. The two are talking about Cathay Pacific’s extremely successful employee advocacy program, which Dennis launched simultaneously with their brand campaign “Life Well Traveled.” Dennis explains how he got the higher ups behind him, the platform they use, what kind of content is successful, and the rewards they give for engaging in the program. This is a great episode to listen to if you’ve been trying to figure out how to factor an employee advocacy program into your business plan.

Key Highlights

[00:30] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Dennis Owen

[03:05] How Dennis Got Into Employee Advocacy

[05:40] How Employee Advocacy Started in Cathay Pacific

[09:46] The Lack of Understanding in Employee Advocacy

[10:36] The Planning Process

[13:34] The Approach on Rewards

[17:24] Measuring KPIs

[20:18] Final Thoughts

[22:57] Connect With Dennis

Notable Quotes

• And I think the main reason I wanted to do it is because it ties very nicely to our new brand campaign, which is called life all traveled. And as an airline, employees we traveled, we have the opportunity to travel for free. So we ourselves, live lives well traveled. And people are interested in travel, people liked to talk about travel, they'd like to see photos, and I thought what a great opportunity to tie internal brand advocacy to this new brand. Campaign life well traveled. So it's been a really nice fit.
• I think it's, it's a matter of just having something fun for people like, it doesn't have to be super expensive, because I think people that are, that are going to get involved with internal brand advocacy, are already sharing things. And they find the joy of that work that as well.
• When you look at a company like Cathay Pacific, we tend to be fairly understated. We're not a company that's out there bragging about ourselves. But there are other entities talking about us all the time, in terms of awards that we've gotten, or the new services. So I haven't found that that's been a real problem of finding content around Cathay Pacific and Dragonair. And sure, we have our own content, as well as we will definitely share that, like I said, with the lawful travel campaign.
• You know, we want people to understand that we're a premium airline. And there's value in terms of flying on Cathay Pacific Dragonair. So I think those were, you know, that's a it's a great story that I just wanted to share.
• Get out there and look and see what other people are saying about your brand. I think it's really valuable when you are able to share stories from other people, not the brand.

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