Evolving our B2B-focused marketing into a customer facing brand

As a marketing manager within the sales department at United Airlines, I was responsible for promoting and acquiring more customers for United’s business travel products. The difficulty was United had multiple product names for a variety of different sized businesses and business types, and communicating with current customers and potential prospects as United Sales just didn’t feel right.

After looking at other travel businesses and the evolution of their B2B brands (Airbnb for Work, Lyft Business, Uber for Business), I created a plan to rebrand our United Sales department as a more customer-centric B2B brand: United for Business.

United for Business created the opportunity for all business products to work together, allowing customers to explore an entire portfolio to find the perfect fit for their organization. It strengthened our marketing efforts, allowing us to synchronize our branded efforts across web, email, social, advertising, and events all driving toward our acquisition path.

Working with my teammate Ashley DuBois, we finalized our marketing plan and received approval from our brand team, legal, and executive leadership at United. We then went to work on launching the brand within a three month timeline and with very little budget (ie. some web hosting fees).

While I was helping drive this effort for our department, I also had an active role in creating the digital ecosystem the brand needed. I single-handily built and launched a United for Business website that featured all of our products, connected all product lead forms directly to our Salesforce CRM, worked with our brand team on a new logo identity, and supported the creation of a variety of branded marketing materials.

In the first six months of the launch, we saw over $5 million in additional revenue coming through the website as the brand continues to evolve across all of United's B2B efforts.

United for Business shines in Times Square

At the end of 2019, my teammate Mike Coontz and I had the opportunity to display the brand on an even bigger canvas: Times Square in New York City.
Check it out >