An Intangible Marketing Opportunity: Airlines and Social Media

During the last decade or so, low-cost airlines like Ryanair and Easyjet have been given a lot of attention as they have been driving down the cost of air travel with a business model that has proven to be highly successful. However, as any marketer knows, there are different ways to compete. Many of Europe’s major airlines such as BA, Lufthansa, AirFrance-KLM and SAS continue to compete on the strength of their brands and the quality reputations they have built up over many years of operating. And for service businesses like airlines, tangibles are an important element of their overall image. So while the low-cost carriers have trimmed away all the extras, the more traditional airlines are going in the opposite direction.

How then does social media fit into the airlines industry? In fact there seems to be large differences. Airlines in Europe seems to be struggling with how to handle all the possibilities that social media marketing offers. Jean Paul Spinetti, CEO of AirFrance-KLM commented that “acquiring new technology represents first and foremost the image of an airline company. its history, values and culture.” However, being highly concerned about being seen as ‘safe and secure’, the adoption of new technology cannot be allowed to influence customers views about ‘seriousness’. And it is no secret that social media marketing has had an image of ‘playfulness’ and ‘down-to-earth’ mentality about it. ‘Playfulness’ and ‘down-to-earth’ is of course something that no airline-company would want to be associated with. It would take until the entrepreneurial renegade Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Atlantic Airways, before social media  entered the European airline market. Branding Virgin Atlantic as ‘cooler’ than BA, Virgin then continued forwards to bring the business of flying down from the boardrooms to the passengers.

Whereas Virgin has then been at the forefront of bringing new ideas of interaction between the carrier and its passengers, airlines in America have been much faster to welcome social media in their marketing efforts. For example, Jet Blue in the US is present on Twitter with over a million followers. Practical ways for airline companies to use social media has been to communicate special offers and seat sales. Others have flight attendants and pilots updating accounts with weather conditions and flight delays. Among other things, the introduction of the interactive entertainment system and the real-life booking, seat-choosing and online check-in possibilities has made a new kind of communication possible. In the Pacific region, Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific were the among the first to introduce real-time entertainment and enhance communication on flights, being quite revolutionary just about five years ago, people are now used to be able to chose movies on demand, games and access the internet when flying. This has driven on research and various real-time media resources are now widely available among the premier airlines.

Recently the Scandinavian flag-carrier SAS made a major investment in interactive check-in and communication when it introduced a system of finger-print identification. This identification-process allows passengers to access personal SAS-accounts for check-in at the airport, bookings and communication with the company through a twitter-like method called Scandinavian.net. Currently the system is on an experimental status and works on domestic services in Sweden and Norway only. It is anticipated though, that finger-print services within the EU from the SAS hubs at Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen will commence during next year.

Image by Caribb

Communications