Eight years ago, Hong Kong’s flag carrier airline was facing a branding crisis. Its marketing team was equally misunderstood and undervalued. Today, its CEO regularly serves drinks to customers at his CMO’s behest. Global Marketer of the Year nominee Edward Bell explains how he has transformed perceptions, internally and externally, to rebuild one of the world’s most influential travel brands.
In 2018, Cathay Pacific was struggling. Under pressure from lower-cost Chinese carriers and Middle East rivals, it posted a consecutive year of financial losses and was planning a redundancy round to restructure the organisation. It was also the year it suffered a massive data breach, with the resulting headlines doing significant damage to its global reputation.
“All the trend lines were going in the wrong direction,” recalls Edward Bell.
Bell joined Cathay as chief marketing officer after more than a decade in agency leadership roles, including senior positions at FCB and Ogilvy across Asia-Pacific. For some CMOs, a mandate like that might have prompted a high-profile campaign designed to quickly reset customer perceptions. Bell, however, believed the problems ran much deeper.
“If you want great outcomes, you need to change the inputs. Wanting to sell more is not going to help you sell more. The company had come from a period of anxiety and difficulty around the sales challenges. So, it was a case of needing to change the recipe,” he says.
In practice, that meant “reorienting” the company around new goals. “Cathay is a very operational company because airlines tend to be like that. We needed to remind everyone that we’re in the service business and redefine success as being loved by our customers, rather than defining success in terms of financial outcomes.”
It demanded that every department of the company – from the C-suite to catering crew, pilots to engineers – strive to make Cathay Pacific “a great service brand.” It’s easy to say, but Bell stresses the challenge of changing the thinking of 30,000 staff.
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“We needed a reframing mechanism to make that happen. We restructured the company values from seven to just three: to be thoughtful, to be progressive, to be meaningful,” he explains.
As part of that, he also implemented a ‘Serve to Lead’ program where senior managers are regularly put in front of customers.
“I’ve done it twice myself. I’ve cleaned the toilets. I’ve served drinks. All of our senior management do that and it gives you the hands-on experience to remind you viscerally that you’re in a service business.”
That he’s convinced the CEO of Cathay Pacific to serve in-flight meals speaks to how marketing’s role in the business has evolved to become more appreciated. Bell admits that its voice hasn’t always been heard and he still sees CMOs in other businesses struggle to earn their place at board level.
“The whole concept of marketing inside the organization, I think, is just so misunderstood and undervalued and underappreciated. This task of internal alignment and horizontal influencing your peers, messaging up, aligning with seniors and telling people in your team about your priorities is just so important.”
At times, he says, it’s been challenging, particularly when people have differing views on what’s important in the business or what the point of focus should be.
“This whole idea of alignment around, do we understand the problem in the same way? Do we agree on what the challenges are? I think sometimes in marketing, you know, we rush to a solution. We want to we want to build it. We want to make it better. We want to inject some love, humor, you know, passion into things. Sometimes, where I can be more effective and where our marketing organization can be more effective is to start with a strong foundation. Are we aligned on seeing the problem in the same way? And I think that’s the foundation of great strategy, right, to understand a problem?”
It might sound simple, but evaluating how it approached customer research was one of the key decisions Bell made that had a knock-on effect on how the business viewed its challenges.
“We changed our research department into an insights department and doubled its size and tripled the budget. We started doing really sophisticated research in-house modelling, you know, choice modelling. We built our own propensity modelling to help us realize what to focus on. We had to change a series of inputs so that we could be more relevant. You have to build a different engine.”
Since 2018, its fortunes have turned around. Its NPS is at an “all-time high” and it’s now in the top three airlines according to a Sky Tracks ranking, which is compiled through customer voting. In 2023, it was ranked 13th.
According to Kantar analysis, Cathay Pacific has significantly improved its brand equity scores in both its Hong Kong home market and mainland China. It’s now the dominant airline brand in Hong Kong and has strengthened its perceived difference, which aids its ability to charge a price premium and grow in the coming year. In China, Cathay Pacific has strengthened its meaningfulness and has further opportunities to strengthen its salience.
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Financially, the group has also recovered. It posed a “strong” financial result for 2024 and the first half of 2025.
More importantly, the executive team is invested in the success of the marketing function. They chase Bell for the latest consumer reports and customer satisfaction scores. “The very, very top echelon of our company understands the very, very raw data on a weekly basis. We’ve bridged that gap between the grassroots and the very senior leadership.”
Today, that buy-in is translating to Bell being able to take more creative risks. For example, after an overhaul of its in-flight dining, the company wanted to tell customers. In the past, that might have meant a fairly tick-box campaign, but Bell convinced the higher-ups to let a comedian, Jimmy O Yang, be the face of the work. Injecting a bit of humor into its marketing was a bold move for the historically corporate airline.
“We’d done beautiful shots of food before, but we wanted to have fun with it and show our confidence in our dining. We just felt like we needed to do some things differently and take some risks,” Bell says.
Then there’s a fly-by it orchestrated to celebrate the Rugby Sevens tournament in Hong Kong. Bell says it was a logistical nightmare. Beyond its own senior team, Bells also needed buy-in from local government, the airport and pilots who had to complete mandatory training to perform the stunt safely.
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“It was just a very mature and sober exercise that took place over many months. But we managed to pull it off. We had the idea, we communicated the idea, we reached out and we convinced people to do it and we delivered, we executed. It was so satisfying. ”
Over the past eight years at the helm, Bell says his biggest learning has been how to speak the language of the CEO and CFO. His job now is to ensure his teams can do the same.
“The single purpose for marketing is to accelerate growth. I’m very clear on that. It’s not enough to just do nice things and it’s not even enough just to produce the results. You need to have the lexicon and the presence of mind to bring people with you on the journey,” he says.
“I see the challenges that the marketing industry has. It’s being pushed out of the business discussion. But what marketing can do better is to re-enter the business discussion. I see my role as modelling how people can do that.”
Edward Bell has been nominated for The Drum and the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Marketer of the Year Award 2025. Find out more about the accolade and this year’s nominees.
Previous winners of the award include Asmita Dubey, chief digital and marketing officer at L’Oréal, who won for 2023, and Marcel Marcondes, global chief marketing officer at AB InBev, who won for 2024.