Canadian style guru sells “swissness” to the Swiss

Tyler Brûlé and the fruits of his labour swissinfo.ch

It took the Canadian "style guru", Tyler Brûlé, to convince the Swiss that "Swiss" is a very marketable commodity.

“Tyler doesn’t like to sit.” That was the answer of Brûlé’s personal assistant when she was asked if he would pose for journalists in one of the first class seats of the new airline.

Instead, Brûle opted to stand outside the hangar in front of a plane belonging to “swiss” – a name that he and his advertising agency, Wink Media, coined for the new national carrier that has succeeded the collapsed Swissair.

Brûlé chose the name “swiss” because in his view it stood for what the new airline was aiming to be – an upmarket carrier “of the highest quality in Europe”.

But why did it take a foreign style guru to convince the management and board of the new airline that “swiss” was a better name than, say, “Mountain Air”?

Why Brûlé?

Brûlé has no doubts about why he was chosen. “I think it’s always a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. When you are so close to something [as the Swiss are], you become immune to it after a while. And I think that’s why we had to come in and underline it.”

Marketing experts agree, but say the reason Brûlé was brought in had as much to do with who he is as with what he knows.

“They [swiss] certainly needed someone with a high profile for the branding of the airline,” says Richard Kuhn, director of the Institute for Marketing at the University of Bern.

Indeed, recent media speculation has focused on precisely how much of influence Brûlé – publisher of the style magazine “Wallpaper” – has actually had on the new airline.

Some newspaper reports say the airline has decided not to implement any of his ideas beyond the name. His grandiose plans for a “flagship” airplane that would be the pride of the swiss fleet, and his announcement that he was in negotiations with a textile company for new aircraft seat covers have come to nothing.

Beyond the brand

Kuhn says Brûlé’s involvement may have been limited by his limited knowledge of the industry. “There’s always a problem if someone is known as a brand developer – he may not know too much about the business reality of that specific brand.”

The new in-flight magazine of swiss pays homage to the Canadian, saying, “Tyler came, he saw and he conquered”. But Björn Näf, swiss executive vice-president in charge of product and services, says Brûlé was hired for his ideas alone, and that swiss is not obliged to implement them.

“On the product side, for example, when he comes to talk about uniforms, we are open to his ideas,” says Näf. “We have to have creative people on one side and other people who can implement his ideas. The combination of the two lead to success.”

It is clear that Brûlé pointed the new Swiss airline in the direction everybody wanted it to go, but the bosses were in need of reassurance from the outside.

Minority complex

“I think the Swiss asked him to help them get over their minority complex,” says Kurt Aeschbacher, a Swiss television personality. “The Swiss find it difficult to take pride in past achievements. It probably needed someone from Canada to tell us a little more about what we have already achieved.”

Back at Zurich airport, the strong spring sunshine reflecting off the new swiss aircraft forces Brûlé to squint as he explains the reasoning behind the design of the new planes, and talks about some more of his ideas for the aircraft.

“It had to be white and incredibly clean,” he says. “We’ve also been looking at having the aircraft cleaned more often so that they will never look grey and unloved.”

Whatever his influence, Brûlé clearly understands what the Swiss find important, even if they might not put it exactly the same way.

by Dale Bechtel