Alex Hunter
Most organisations can reach customers. Very few keep them. A bad experience now outruns the best campaign, and loyalty is earned one customer at a time.
Alex Hunter helps large organisations convert digital reach into real customer loyalty, drawing on his time running global digital strategy inside the Virgin Group.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Alex Hunter
- He ran Virgin Group’s global digital strategy and Sir Richard Branson’s personal digital presence. That is rare operator experience at the intersection of corporate brand and personal brand at global scale.
- As a founding-team member at Virgin America, he built the marketing campaign that won the airline public support during its certification process. His work was covered by Time, CNN and CNBC.
- His travel series Attaché has been named Travel Vlogger of the Year at the Travel Media Awards four separate times. He has had to build and keep a digital audience himself, which sharpens how he thinks about customer loyalty for the brands he advises.
- His client work spans Volkswagen, IKEA, Adobe, Shell, Salesforce, L’Oréal, Pepsi and McDonald’s. The pattern recognition he brings to a brand question comes from operating across categories where customer expectations look nothing alike.
Biography highlights
- Former Global Head of Online for the Virgin Group, including oversight of Sir Richard Branson’s personal digital strategy.
- Founding-team member at Virgin America as Manager of Interactive Marketing. Work honoured with ad:tech and Webby Award recognition and covered by Time, CNN and CNBC.
- Creator and host of Attaché. Named Travel Vlogger of the Year at the Travel Media Awards in 2016, 2017, 2023 and 2024.
- Co-host of Layovers, an air travel and aviation podcast that has charted at number one in more than fifty countries.
- Venture Partner at Ignite Accelerator. Former trustee of UK alcohol education charity Drinkaware and advisor to the Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Trust on social media engagement.
- Speaker and advisor to organisations including Volkswagen, IKEA, Adobe, Shell, Salesforce, Twitter, L’Oréal, Pepsi, McDonald’s and the BBC.
Biography
Virgin runs across airlines, telecoms, music, trains, space travel and wellness, and the brand reads as a single personality in each. Getting that kind of consistency out of a global portfolio is a specific operational discipline. Alex Hunter spent years running it.
As Global Head of Online for the Virgin Group, Hunter oversaw digital strategy across the entire brand portfolio and ran Sir Richard Branson’s personal digital presence. Before that he was a founding-team member at Virgin America, where his marketing campaign won the airline public support during certification and was covered by Time, CNN and CNBC.
He has also worked the other side of the table, as a creator. His travel series Attaché has been named Travel Vlogger of the Year at the Travel Media Awards four times since 2016. His aviation podcast Layovers has charted at number one in over fifty countries. Both have required him to build and hold an audience himself, which is what the brands he advises are trying to do at scale.
His client list runs through Volkswagen, IKEA, Adobe, Shell, Salesforce, L’Oréal, Pepsi and McDonald’s. What he gives each is a view shaped by running Virgin’s digital brand at portfolio scale and then earning his own audiences from zero. The first taught him that brand consistency is a daily editorial discipline. The second taught him that customer loyalty is won episode by episode and can be lost in one.
Key speaking topics
- Brand strategy in a digital-first market
- Customer experience and loyalty
- Digital marketing and audience engagement
- Content, storytelling and brand voice
- Building brands at corporate scale and startup pace
- Customer expectations across industries
Ideal for
- Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Brand Officers and Chief Customer Officers setting brand and loyalty agendas
- Digital, e-commerce and customer experience leadership teams
- Agency leadership and in-house creative teams briefing against enterprise clients
- Board and executive forums where brand reputation sits alongside revenue and risk
Audience outcomes
- A sharper view of where their brand actually lives in a customer’s day, and where it does not
- The specific places digital investment earns loyalty and the specific places it wastes it
- A working definition of customer experience that separates noise from the decisions that move repeat business
- Examples from inside Virgin, Virgin America and his own Attaché audience of what consistency costs and what it earns
Talks
A session on how brands earn repeat customers and organic advocacy in markets where attention is cheap and a single bad experience can cost a year of campaign work.
Key takeaways:
- What separates a customer who transacts once from a customer who returns and brings others
- The digital decisions that build loyalty and the ones that only chase reach
- How the loyalty mechanics actually work inside brands like Virgin, and where they most often break in other organisations
A practical look at how memorable customer experience is designed on purpose, and what it takes to deliver it consistently at scale.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between a service that works and an experience a customer wants to talk about
- Why many digital customer experience programmes plateau and what moves them past that ceiling
- Specific moments inside Virgin America where the customer experience was designed on purpose and what that cost to maintain