Up in the Air: The Story Behind SimpliFlying

The youngest-ever winner of the Global Brand Leadership Award, Shashank Nigam is proof that you don’t need a boatload of experience to launch a successful start-up. He talks to us about how he got his award-winning blog SimpliFlying off the ground and turned it into a global branding consultancy business.

Boredom, as it has been said, can be a great catalyst for action and this couldn’t have been truer for Shashank Nigam, founder and CEO of airline marketing blog-turned-consultancy SimpliFlying. Shashank, who cheerfully admits to having a long-standing love affair with planes, says it was all thanks to the winter he spent in Boston while working for tech start-up Endeca that he hit upon the idea of starting the blog in 2008.

“It gets really cold and dark at around 4pm with nothing to do in the winter,” he recalls. “I’ve always liked planes and airlines, so I decided to do some research to see if I could find an intersection of my two interests – airlines and branding – but I couldn’t find anything on the Internet. There was information on everything from startups to Coke. There were airline consulting companies that focused on the technical side of things – operations, network planning, flight operations and scheduling – but none on branding. So I thought, ‘Why don’t I just start a website and write articles analyzing airlines and brands?’”

Armed with nothing but enthusiasm for the subject, he started writing thrice a week. “Just random airline analyses – my first few articles were really off the mark!”

Finding his groove

Nevertheless, he soon realized that there was something quite unique about airlines and airports that set them apart from other industries. “After four or five months, I noticed that airline branding is really unique to the industry and you can’t apply generic principles of branding to it. Generally, with a can of Coke, your brand engagement is two minutes. With Starbucks, it’s anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. With an airline, it can be anywhere from two to twenty-four hours depending on how long your flight is.”

Based on this observation, Nigam wrote Six Steps to Building a Swashbuckling Airline Brand (PDF), a white paper that examines the six unique factors that contribute to an airline company’s brand. However what he wasn’t prepared for was the response to the paper. “It got published by Interbrand’s Brandchannel.com as the featured white paper of Summer 2008. I was really surprised because they generally publish papers written by PhDs or retired industry veterans. It was just as well that I didn’t state my age because I might not have gotten published!”

Taking the plunge

Buoyed by the response to the paper, Nigam started looking at his blog in a new light. “At the time I was still working full-time in Boston and doing this on the side. I decided that maybe I should take myself more seriously and sent the white paper to a few airline folks I knew, like Mike Barclay (CEO of Sentosa and former CEO of SilkAir) and asked them for their feedback. It was generally “Hey, very good ideas. I’ve been thinking about these theories for years and you’re making a lot of sense. But it’s professor speak – you can’t really do anything with it. Bring out the tactical side of it.”

His lack of experience in the industry was also another factor that convinced him to come up with a tactical strategy that would show how social media could drive airline branding and customer engagement. However it wasn’t an easy task. “Back in 2008, social media was just emerging and people were really skeptical about it. MySpace was dying and Friendster was at its peak. They didn’t know if social media was another fad that would come and go. I had an uphill task convincing airline companies about using these new technologies to engage their customers.”

Entering start-up mode

Nigam quit his job in Boston in Dec 2008 returned to Singapore to incorporate and work on Simplifying full-time. “I had $20,000 in savings from my one and a half years working at Endeca. I told myself I had to break even before the money ran out or I’d have to return to the job pool.”

Luckily for him, the company broke even in nine months and even better, it did so using less than $10,000. Although Nigam was running the company all by himself, he made sure to assemble a board of advisors to guide him. Among them was Donald Schenk, President and CEO of Airline Capital Associates in New York.