Some SIA customers have received an email recently inviting them to come up with creative portraits that show the A380 near a famous London landmark. Every week, the top voted submission gets featured on the frontpage of SIA’s A380 Gallery. To top it all off, customers are also being encouraged to share their A380 experiences on the same website.

This is a commendable attempt to engage the customer before the flight, hence aligning Brand Xpectations, and continuing the engagement post-flight, encouraging Brand Xpression (something not many airlines are good at). Customers who depict A380 near a London landmark are literally fantasizing that they are present at the location themselves – what better way to induce a person to get a ticket on the first A380 to land at Heathrow? Also, with a large number of customers blogging about their A380 experiences anyway, consolidating them on a single SIA-operated website makes perfect sense. The customers can enjoy some online fame, as other read their experiences and potential customers can read ahead if SIA is delivering on the Xpectations.

The innovative use of user-generated content involves the customer before and after the flight, and extends the engagement with the brand for a much longer period of time than other carriers are able to. SIA currently seems way ahead of the game. Let’s see how long others take to catch up.

Ponder that!

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