Location of work and the subthemes

Table 5.8 presents the split in the representation of the employees with employee stories split by the location or section of the airline that they work in. The four categories were defined and presented on Cathay Pacific’s specific People. They make an airline website. The purpose of presenting the data that allows for the comparison of the presence and number of instances of subtheme mentions is to determine whether particular subthemes are more aligned with particular tasks undertaken by certain roles or in particular sections of the airline. Table I presents this data.

As Table 5.8 presents, cabin crew are most represented in the employee stories making up 41%, next is behind the scenes with 33%, followed by 18% employees who work at the airport and finally are those in the cockpit, the pilots, with 8%. It is interesting to note that even though they are in a non-customer facing role, employees who work behind the scenes are so well represented in the employee stories.

Table 5.8: The employee stories and their split by the employee's role

Table 5.9 presents a comparison of presence of subthemes in employee stories split by the location or section of the airline worked in. Of note is that for the pilot employee stories, indicated as those who work in the cockpit, 100% had a presence of Challenges, Satisfaction, Encountering and Self Improvement. This is perhaps an indication of what the brand intends and desires to communicate about its pilots and their personalities.

Table 5.9 presents that Airport employee stories had the highest presence of Hospitality, with those behind the scenes, in the cabin or cockpit reporting similar results for presence of Hospitality. It is interesting that behind the scenes and cockpit employees had such a high presence of Hospitality, 80.6% and 75% respectively, as aspects of Hospitality such as serving and caring for customers/passengers are not typically or are considerably less part of the tasks in their role. Behind the scenes, airport and cabin employees all had similar results of presence of Familiarity, perhaps not unexpectedly due to their roles; Familiarity was least common for pilots. All sectors have high percentages of presence of Challenges, the lowest being Airport employees with 88.2% and the highest, pilots with 100%.

Pilots had the lowest percentage of presence of Excitement, considerably less than the next lowest percentage, Airport employees with 29.4% compared with the pilots’$ 12.5%. However, pilots had the highest percentage of presence of Safety with 25%, with the three other sectors having very close percentages ranging from 11.8% to 12.9%. It is also important to note the large disparity in the percentages of presence of Self Improvement. For airport employees Self Improvement was present in 23.5% of their stories, compared with 83.9% for behind the scenes, 84.6% for cabin crew and 100% for pilots.

Table 5.9: Percentage of subtheme mentions split by the role of the particular employee

5.5 Summary

The objective of this data was to identify the major and minor themes of the text, namely the employee stories. As a form of brand communication the employee stories are representative of the brand’s storytelling and therefore this sample serves to indicate the major and minor themes for Cathay Pacific’s storytelling. The data demonstrates that Challenges, Self Improvement and Hospitality are the major themes of Cathay Pacific’s storytelling. These are supported by the minor themes of Satisfaction, Encountering, Familiarity and Culture. The following analytical chapters will focus on how through a particular structure these construct a specific understanding of the brand and project the desired attributes of the brand. The function of these subthemes in the construction and projection of Cathay Pacific’s brand which will be discussed further in Chapter ix.

The collection of the data also allows for the data to be presented to compare and contrast the split of the presence and prevalence of the subthemes in the employee stories by gender and by role in the airline. This has identified that according to the presence of subthemes in the employee stories that female employees mention Hospitality significantly more than their male counterparts. This suggests that the female portion of the airline’s workforce is perhaps more focused on these particular notions of Hospitality or additionally, that these notions are more commonly attributed to female employees. On the other hand, through subtheme mentions male employees are associated more with Encountering and Satisfaction, perhaps an indication that the notions of these subthemes are associated more with male employees.

Worthy of note in the comparison of subtheme presence in the employee stories, when split by role within the airline is the actual lack of many significant disparities. This perhaps suggests that the subthemes are intended to be communicated across the airline and that the focus is in the brand’s attributes and the implication of the subthemes are relatively consistent across the entire organisation than differences for specific roles. Comparing the presence and prevalence of subthemes in the employee stories split by gender and by role in the airline is particularly relevant for the construction of the characters in the brand’s storytelling, which will be discussed in Chapter Seven.