You’d be forgiven if you thought Sunwing’s CMO Samantha Taylor has been in the travel industry for many years.
The CMO is right at home in their offices, where she’s been the past three years after an impressive career in retail that includes top positions at Indigo and Mattel. Decisions to change career trajectories aren’t easy ones and often take courage and a little bit of foresight. Clearly Taylor has both; she decided to start her travel career in what was arguably the darkest time in our industry.
“There were lots of moments where I would think - what am I doing? I’m literally about to go into this industry, and it is on the ground,” she tells TravelPulse Canada. “I didn’t know where this was going to go, but I also never wanted my story to be I didn’t try, I couldn’t have handled that.”
Taylor credits her many conversations with Sunwing Vacations Group CEO Stephen Hunter as what ultimately helped make her decision to join the team.
“He said “I can teach you travel; you can do the rest’. I think Stephen is a visionary for that; he was very much hiring for knowledge that would be a disruption to the industry.”
Taylor began her career fresh out of school, at Hallmark Canada. What she thought was going to be a coveted gig in the advertising department, filled with socializing and surrounded by creativity, turned into a position in the research department.
“I thought I’m going to go to agency parties, I’m going to be doing all sorts of cool stuff,” she laughs. “And then I showed up and they said they had to change plans and I was going to spend the summer in research. I just thought, oh my God - it was traumatizing.”
Taylor spent all summer doing research reports, and what she calls “the hard work and evaluating peers’ promotional activities. At the end of the summer, she was offered a permanent job in the research department where she stayed for one year.
“That year was the best foundational training I could have ever asked for. But I look back and it grounds everything I do. It’s not a matter of opinion, whether you like blue and I like pink, or you’re more senior. It’s about what the customer is telling us they want.
Research has always been the great equalizer, it grounds whoever I’m talking with and allowed me to move businesses forward.”
Taylor says Hunter’s decision to bring in a CMO that reports to him puts brand and the importance of the customer on equal footing of every other division in the company and is a very modern approach. Under that model, Taylor’s extensive background has allowed the company to think in directions it hasn’t before and focus on marketing to the client base in new ways. While some might consider the toy and retail industries to be unrelated to travel, Taylor says the skill set is very much the same.
“It’s very transferable, because you have an expiry date with so much of the business happening during the holidays. It’s very volatile in toys, and the winner is picked by a seven year old,” she laughs. “It’s a very specific skill set and stress level you get used to. And then with retail, it's all in the details. It's real time while also working in different time zones, it's planning for six months from now, but also delivering the business tomorrow.”
The travel industry is known for its employee longevity, so we asked Taylor what it was like to not only be a woman but be new to the industry and implementing changes.
“I think I had the benefit of coming in at a senior level and that changes the playing field. I'm a little bit embarrassed to say that, but it's just the fact,” she says shyly. “That said, I also had the benefit that during that first year, change was absolutely necessary, and we had to adapt to a new post-pandemic world. COVID did a lot of the heavy lifting for me.
That time also allowed me to earn trust and build the foundational changes we needed to make in terms of how we market, laying down infrastructure, laying down proper data management, revamping the systems; really pulling out the guts while the engines were off. By the time the business did start to come back, there was already a foundational level of respect there and then we could build on that.”
In Taylor’s position with Sunwing, marketing, PR, data and digital all fall under her guidance, something she says helps shape the customer experience and allows her department to be the voice of the customer.
“Our understanding coming out of COVID, was to invest in not only knowing our customers, but to be able to engage with them better. Now we're looking at how to elevate their entire experience, so it’s more seamless overall.
I think that that is a game changer, and how great brands succeed; they know where to place the customer in the pecking order.”
Taylor’s advice to women is to remember that with careers, you’re paid in two currencies: experience and money. If you take the experience first, the money will come.
"If people really want to manage their career, they should make sure to get all the experience they can at each level before they feel it's necessary to go up. I feel that’s a big lesson for today’s generation, we’re so obsessed with getting to the next level we are cutting short our own growth and development.
I also don't want my team today feeling like to sit in this office, you have to pretend to be somebody that you're not. You can lead with empathy. You can be civil, you don't have to talk down to people, you don't have to take on that abrasive past. Because that's the culture that's been around in business for so long.
We can do things differently.”
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