Engage your employees with purpose, and you give your company a huge advantage.

By helping your employees understand the purpose of your company, you open up opportunities for them to build and add value to your brand. Robin Tooms visits with Ralph Vasami, president and CEO of Universal Weather and Aviation.

Robin: Hello, and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I’m Robin Tooms, vice president of strategy at Savage Brands. And my guest today is Ralph Vasami, CEO at Universal Weather and Aviation. So, Ralph, I want to welcome you back to Brandonomics.

Ralph: It’s good to be back, Robin. Thanks for having me.

Robin: Well, we’ve talked some about the brand launch that you’ve kind of unrolled recently at Universal Weather, but it really didn’t start there. It kind of started farther back with you establishing the true corporate purpose and then building the brand from that. So tell us a little bit how did you arrive at the corporate purpose?

Ralph: The corporate purpose was—we really arrived by just sort of doing a deep dive on, what are we really trying to achieve? What problems are we trying to solve for our customers? And if your employees really don’t understand the significance of their mission, then it’s gonna be bricklaying as opposed to building cathedrals. And so with our customers, when we asked our employees, it ended up being answers like, “We’re trying to get them from point A to B. We’re trying to give them good service,” instead of understanding that the flight can be a humanitarian flight, where you’re actually helping to save and enrich lives: helping companies grow their businesses, which then helps global economies improve; helping families spend more time together just on leisure and vacations. And when they started to understand that they’re contributing to those higher causes than just a job, you could almost hear a pin drop in the room. And the feedback really—I don’t know, it kind of repurposed them as individuals to go out there the next day and really go get it.

Robin: Yeah. So now when you’re having that brand conversation of,  “we’re managing risk in a complex world,” they understand what that means. It’s not just about delivering the bulletins.

Ralph: Exactly. Exactly. Because at the end of the day, the brand is about all the actions and behaviors of our people every day. Any one of our people could make or break the brand on any given day around the world. So we’re trying to create that level of engagement and alignment so that they could live what we want that brand to be every day.

Robin: That sounds perfect.

Ralph: Okay. Good.

Robin: All right. Thank you, Ralph, so much for sharing that.

Ralph: Sure.

Robin: Absolutely. This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

Universal Weather & Aviation shares a purpose with its clients as they navigate a complex world – the success of their trip. The global business aviation trip management company empowers its 1,700 employees to share clients’ sense of urgency and exhaust their global resources to meet the needs of those who utilize business aviation. https://www.universalweather.com/