When AirAsia chief Tan Sri Tony Fernandes told Singaporean Kathleen Tan to ‘go change China’, the aviation novice got herself a map and started knocking on doors . Now, she is the most powerful woman in the airline.
HER life changed, she says, during a Linkin Park concert at Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka Stadium in 2003.
Kathleen Tan – then managing director of Warner Music Group in Singapore – was jumping up and down to the headbanging beats of the nu metal band when she felt someone pulling her away.
It was (Tan Sri) Tony Fernandes, her former boss who had left the music label a couple of years earlier to start Malaysian low-cost carrier AirAsia.
“He said, ‘Kat, do you want to help me run an airline?’” she recalls.
She replied: “Offer me whatever I’m getting at Warner, and I’ll think about it.”
Flying high: Kathleen Tan’s nous for marketing has helped lift AirAsia, where she is now regional head of commercial, to great heights in the industry. – Photo courtesy of The Straits TimesFernandes succeeded in cajoling her. A year later, Tan found herself in the AirAsia office in Kuala Lumpur.
It was a far cry from what she had imagined.
“The office was an engineering shack on the tarmac in Kuala Lumpur International Airport,” recalls Tan, who is a Singaporean, single and in her 40s.
She had no office of her own, no job title and no idea of what she was supposed to do. She was surrounded by engineers and flight operations people, very different from the creative sorts in her previous job.
“Every morning, I walked the corridor of the office and nobody knew who I was. I’d never felt so unconfident in my life,” she says. Fernandes was not there; he was busy travelling, preparing for the airline’s initial public offering.
“He said to me, ‘Kat, you were an MD in Warner, you don’t need me to teach you.’”
It rankled that everyone appeared so busy while she twiddled her thumbs.
Three weeks after she joined AirAsia, she sent an SMS to Fernandes while he was in New York, saying she was throwing in the towel.
“He called me from New York and said, ‘Kat, don’t go. I have big plans for you and I believe in you. In Warner, you brought in a lot of new ideas.’”
Then he issued her a challenge: “Go change China.”
She put down the phone.
“If Tony said he believed in me, why couldn’t I believe in myself? And he was paying my salary. So I decided to get on with it.”
There was only one problem.
“I knew nothing, there was nobody to teach me. I decided that I need to grow a really thick skin.”
She then requested briefings from all departments in the airline to get a grasp of the business. She read up everything she could on the growing low-cost carrier (LCC) industry.
“My mentors were Stelios Haji-Ioannou and David Neeleman,” she says, referring to the founders of established LCCs easyJet and JetBlue.
Then she bought herself the biggest map of China she could find and hightailed it there with a colleague from Macau and started knocking on doors.
She headed first for bustling, high-growth cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
“When you come from retail, you learn how to smell money,” says Tan who was once divisional head of marketing for FJ Benjamin, handling fashion and luxury labels such as Guess, Gucci and Fendi.
Sceptics sniggered and predicted she would wilt in the presence of Chinese airport officials. They were also convinced that Chinese travellers would not buy air tickets online, a basic pillar of AirAsia’s low-cost model.
None of it fazed her.
“I had to tell the Chinese what I could do for them, not what they could do for me. I showed them what low-cost carriers had done for the aviation industry in Europe.”
Nailing first deal
Her break came in Xiamen, Fujian province, where she met an airport chairman she describes as visionary.
“We spoke in Hokkien and I told him we were ka ki nang (Hokkien for kin). I said: ‘Can I go back and tell my boss we have a deal? This is such a big country and I don’t have a deal yet.’”
She sealed the deal on the first meeting and Xiamen became AirAsia’s first China destination in 2006.
The straight talker admits she has no issues exploiting her femininity.
“Just play to your advantage, give things a light touch, act a little weak if you need to,” she says with a laugh.
But she makes clear that when the occasion demands it, she can be every bit as aggressive as an alpha male and tells how she once downed more than 20 shots of maotai, the potent Chinese liquor, to nail a deal.
“I don’t take no for an answer.”
Today, AirAsia operates more than 200 flights weekly to seven cities in China: Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Chongqing, Guilin, Hangzhou and Tianjin. Others like Kunming, Changsha and Nanjing are waiting in the wings.
“We have five million Chinese travelling with us every year,” she boasts.
Today, Tan is a sought-after aviation expert Chinese airport officials ask to see, to discuss air routes and aviation deals.
As regional head of commercial, she is Fernandes’ right-hand woman overseeing about 15 divisions in the airline.
“I take care of marketing, branding, revenue management, sales and media, network planning, social media, innovation and products like credit cards, insurance....” she says, rattling off the many slices of the pie on her plate.
Given away as infant
Call it irony but at birth, Kathleen Tan was considered such a harbinger of bad luck that she was given away.
She was the youngest of seven children, and her father fell ill and died not long after she was born in Singapore.
On the advice of superstitious relatives and neighbours, the infant was given away to her mother’s older sister, who lived in Johor.
None of that has affected her, she says with a shrug.
“Those were different times,” she says, revealing that she is close to both her natural and adoptive mothers and siblings.
She spent the first seven years of her life running wild and free in her adoptive mother’s coffee shop in Pontian Kechil, mingling with colourful denizens and picking up life skills and street smarts by the bucket.
She returned to Singapore to study first at Stamford Girls and then at Whitley Secondary School, and finished her A-Levels at Outram Institute before graduating with a diploma in marketing from the Marketing Institute of Singapore.
Tan cut her professional teeth in the advertising business, working as an account executive for the likes of Leo Burnett and Mojo before heading over to fashion retailer FJ Benjamin.
Her next stop was the equally glitzy world of music. She spent three years in Hong Kong as regional marketing director in Warner before returning home to be managing director of the Singapore office for seven years.
She has no hang-ups about her lack of a fancy educational pedigree.
Formal qualifications will give you a leg up in life, she says, but to succeed a person needs “EQ, IQ and AQ” – she means emotional, intelligence and adversity quotients.
She defines AQ as the ability to roll with the punches and the stamina to turn setbacks into victories.
“When I decided to stay in AirAsia, I told myself I would take this new chapter in my life positively so that I wouldn’t be miserable. I said I’d give myself three years. Well, three has become eight,” says Tan, who will be featured in the upcoming issue of Think Quarterly, Google’s online magazine which provides insights into the minds of global leaders.
A self-confessed workaholic, she loves how the job has stretched her both professionally and personally.
“It’s taken me to places I’d never thought of going and made me do things I would not have entertained doing.”
That includes fashioning herself into something of a celebrity, like her flamboyant boss.
“When Tony told me to be AirAsia’s face of China, I realised I could not be a boring person,” she says.
“He humanises the brand that is AirAsia. He’s taught me that without the human element and personalities, AirAsia would be just like any other airline,” says Tan who has been dubbed an “aviation legend” by Chinese search giant Baidu.
She developed her own style, jumping on the hurtling speed machine that is social media.
She was an early adopter of Facebook and Twitter but it was China’s wildly popular microblogging service Weibo that turned her into the Stefanie Sun of the aviation world.
Since making her first Weibo post on Dec 14, 2010, she has attracted more than 60,000 fans who follow her daily posts – on issues ranging from management philosophy to fashion and AirAsia deals.
“I’ve become the window to the world for many who follow me so I use it to talk about AirAsia’s culture, leadership, and write a management tip or two,” she says.
Weibo has also helped her understand Chinese travellers better, and she has done three meet-the-fans sessions in Chengdu, Beijing and Guangzhou.
“I was curious to find out who these people were so I said, ‘Free to meet for coffee?’ I was surprised when a few hundred turned up.”
If not for AirAsia, she says with a laugh, she would probably have been a digital dinosaur. Instead, she became the prime mover of the airline’s adoption of social media.
“When I decided to set up a social media team, I went out and hired young people and told them, ‘You are my future, tell me about your world.’”
She, in turn, plays mentor and imparts her experience.
“They know about the medium, but I’m a marketing person so I teach them how to do marketing by exploiting the medium.”
Thanks to her efforts, AirAsia last year surpassed the one million fans mark and became the second most popular airline in the world on Facebook, after Southwest Airlines in the United States.
In more ways than one, she sees herself as an extension of AirAsia: a gutsy, sometimes naughty challenger.
“When an opportunity presents itself, we take it and multiply it many times.” – The Straits Times, Singapore/Asia News Network
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