It might seem like an anxious start to the new year for AirAsia X, which recently announced that it would be introducing a daily KL-Sydney service and terminating all its flights to Europe and India. Far from being in the doldrums, it’s all part of the airline’s strategy to refocus and strengthen its brand, as its CEO Azran Osman-Rani shared with SimpliFlying in our latest airline strategy podcast.
Listen to the exclusive podcast below.
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(c) 2012 SimpliFlying Podcasts
Note: The HTML5 player above should work with most modern browsers including those in mobile devices such as the iPad and iPhone. However, if you’re having trouble playing the file, please use the flash player at the bottom of this post. Please also note that the podcast above has only a snippet of the interview with Azran. To delve deeper into the mind of …
In marketing, we often talk about the value of brand associations, of being at the top of the mind of consumers and having the brand instantly connect with a feeling, memory etc. However, putting all this into practice is probably one of the hardest things in the industry. According to researchers, there can only be 3 brands in of a consumer per category… don’t believe me?
A short brand-recognition exercise
Let’s do a little exercise: name 3 brands of Cola.
Now let me guess: The first one that you thought of was: Coca Cola? And maybe the color red? The second one was: Pepsi, perhaps? And the third one? Maybe you struggled a bit with this one, but probably it was the top selling “white label” brand from your local supermarket
Let’s do one more:
Think of good times (or more specifically, the recent holiday season) and name a brand of soft drinks.
I guess that you probably thought of something similar to the image below:
One last test:
Can you think of the holiday season and an airline/airport in the same breath?
Having troubles? Well it’s understandable since no airline …
SimpliFlying has become known for its thought leadership in the aviation marketing space – from our Top 10 Case Study packs to our infographics and presentations at industry conferences. And this year, we’re looking to carry on the streak with the introduction of podcasts, webinars, eBooks and a major expansion into airport marketing! To accomplish this, we need to work with great minds and it’s with great excitement and pride that I introduce to you two new members of the SimpliFlying family who have joined us recently.
Marco Serusi, Valencia, Spain
Marco Serusi joined SimpliFlying in November 2011 as Community Engagement Executive, based in Valencia (Spain). He specializes in creating content related to airline marketing strategies and in maintaining our thought leadership in this area through upcoming initiatives like eBooks and podcasts. In the short time he’s been with us, he’s already launched SimpliFlying on Google+ and re-launched our Facebook fan page.
Before joining SimpliFlying, Marco worked for Aeronova, a Spanish charter airline, where he started as an intern and, within a year, became the youngest director of the company, taking up his former position of Marketing and …
Last week, we announced that we’re revamping the SimpliFlying Heroes initiative and hereon we’d be crowning our Heroes after a free and fair voting process open to all. Now, after an exhilarating and arduous week of voting, the masses have spoken. Pooja Dua of SpiceJet has secured the highest number of votes in a keenly contested race that saw the two other stalwarts – Christian Kamhaug of SAS and Diego Quesada Grimaldo of COPA Airlines – take it down to the wire.
These are how the final results stacked up. Painfully close between Pooja and Diego, we must admit.
Congratulations Pooja!
What’s noteworthy is that the last week saw a record number of votes pouring in to the site in support of the various contestants and the final number stacks up to almost 3000 votes.That’s really, really huge. Thank you everyone for voting. Do watch out for next month’s nominees in the first week of February. Meanwhile, there’s good news for the two stalwarts who were pipped to the post: they’ll have one more chance in the coming months to win the crown and get a chance at a wildcard entry to this …
On the morning of December 1st 2011, the world woke up feeling a little empty and sad: Rico, the Air New Zealand mascot, had been “killed”. Eleven days after the unthinkable happened, and thanks to the help of Rico’s Facebook followers the “killer”, Richard Simmons, confessed his “crime”.
Even though he is no more, for marketers and air transport professionals alike Rico will live forever as part of our memories, presentations and as a source of inspiration for future strategies. What follows is a resume of his brief but well-lived life that, hopefully, will help us remember his best moments and better understand the marketing strategy for which he was created, due to which he thrived, lived and, sadly, was done away with.
Rico’s character was originally launched in October 2010 to promote Air New Zealand’s premium economy space seats. Even though what sort of animal he was and where he came from always remained a bit of a mystery, his fluffy persona was apparently designed as an effort to differentiate the advertising campaign by not using a human being. As Rob Fyfe CEO of Air New Zealand explained in his …
The past year has been an interesting and very successful one for Simpliflying with a number of new client acquisitions and tons of exciting free resources such as infographics and Top 10 case-packs posted regularly to the blog amongst other things. At the brink of the new year, we relive ten of the most popular articles on SimpliFlying in 2011:
10. Social seating: Have you read about the Malaysian Airline initiative that led the airline to create a much talked about Facebook booking engine that allowed people to sit with their friends on the airline’s flights?
9. Airports in social media: In the ninth place we have a Top 10 case-pack, an initiative helmed by our Senior Innovation Officer Shubhodeep Pal, on how airports have driven engagement trough social media.
8. Blockbuster social initiative: Next, in 8th place we find one, if not the, most successful social media campaigns of 2011, the AA Advantage “mystery miles” campaign that hit the headlines in February by achieving an 84 fold growth of its Facebook fans in 54 hours.
7. Airline Twitter initiatives: In the seventh place we find …
“You have such a cool job. I’m so jealous…”
“But honestly, do you even have a job?”
“Wow! That sounds interesting. But I still didn’t get what you do.” [Cue embarrassment at one end. Exasperation at the other.]
“When do you work? How do you work? It’s possible to work only on a computer? From anywhere?”
“Are you looking for a job? There’s an opening at…”
Believe it or not, none of these sentences is made up. Over a year of working with SimpliFlying, I’ve become accustomed to being bombarded with variants of such inanities more often than not. Happily, most of the times such queries are easily shrugged at or laughed off. But there comes a time when you want to reflect on the past year, on where you stand, where you’ve reached from where you started and of course, dispel any doubts that might linger in the minds of those (such as some over-inquisitive relatives) who’re eager to know more about you and your work. The brink of a new year is the perfect time for such soul-cleansing.
The Machinist
First of all, yes …
Our friends at Eezeer have analysed the Twitter habits of airlines as well as their fans/customers for the month of November and have produced the Monthly Twitter Report in continuation with their monthly coverage and analysis of the dynamic social media landscape for airlines.
At the close of the year, it’s worth pausing to consider how quickly the social landscape has evolved over the past year or so. Airlines have not only embraced Twitter but have also realised that there’s great value in using it to drive specific goals such as revenue, engagement and loyalty. Many innovative initiatives on Twitter have been captured in our Top 10 case-packs as well. It’s worth noting that as of November 2011 there were 198 airlines on Twitter with 90 actively tweeting. This, more than anything else, is a sign of changing times and even greater change to come.
A number of facts are immediately clear from this report:
Even though most airlines have jumped on to the Twitter bandwagon, the majority of the tweets are produced by a minority of airlines. 30 airlines provide more than 83% of tweets sent out by airlines.
Delta Air Lines is still the runaway champion, having been consistently been a …
Yes, I said it: branding!
The benefits of crowdsourcing, and its effectiveness for problem solving, are well-known. The power of the social web is being harnessed by airlines more than ever (in fact, a cargo-carrier has recently got into the game as well). Crowdsourcing initiatives are now being used not just to engage customers but also to find ways to improve their product and services, as well as at the same time building their brands. Hence, “crowdbranding”.
With today’s Top 10 case-pack we would like to highlight some of the best examples of airline crowdsourcing. At the same time, we also invite our readers to have a look beyond the surface and into the deeper strategic goals that drive each of these strategies. In some cases it will be clear that the end game was indeed solving a problem or finding an innovative way of addressing existing issues, but in others it will also be clear that the stated goal of the crowdsourcing campaign wasn’t the only goal.
Most of the airline examples included in this Top 10 used crowdsourcing to solve problems related to visible parts of their product such as in-flight meals or routes, and did so in …
