I couldn't help but making a bit fun of Aer Lingus' Spanish website, which offers a truly special service: reservations for unaccompanied babies! Cool.
Best practice : Aer Lingus and Vueling Case Studies
An interesting case is Aer Lingus, Ireland’s former “flag carrier”, which at one point realized that it lacked the captive markets of the BA-IB-AA North Atlantic powerhouse and its nearby Heathrow power-hub, but also the cost leadership to resist Ryanair’s fares on its European network. Additionally, also Dublin based Ryanair increased political and financial pressure on Aer Lingus as it launched a not so friendly takeover attempt.
No doubt, Aer Lingus found itself in an existential crisis with two potential outcomes: be someone else’s lunch or reinvention. It decided to try the latter.
Without abandoning its brand recognition and strong association with Ireland, it made a clean cut on all fronts: it left the Oneworld alliance, got a new internationally reputed CEO and launched a different business model, a “dual hybrid short haul/full service long haul airline”. It completely revamped its short and medium haul offering with a clearly defined and well-communicated a-la-carte pricing value proposition. At the same time, the long-haul flights remained “full-service”, creating a highly competitive positioning as a connection product between Europe and the USA.
This “two in one airline” approach helped to manage expectations and avoided the errors of other network carriers that had silently eliminated free services in parts of their networks without redefining what the “seamless end-to-end” promise implied by being a network carrier would mean after introducing the changes. For example, the elimination of free meals on Iberia’s and AA’s medium haul connections to intercontinental flights was perceived by customer as a “broken value promise”. Had they redesigned customer expectations before introducing the change like Aer Lingus did, the value equation could have become positive.
However, Aer Lingus reinvention is still “work in progress”. The lack of focus on “desirable” value of the services now available at an extra cost, the bumpy website, its careless translations (at least into Spanish) and inconsistent fare policies (communicating cheap one way fares that in reality only apply to return tickets) can still cause customer confusion. But, for sure, Aer Lingus is on the right track.
Free Bonus: a CEM workshop exercise
Would you like to try a CEM workshop exercise? Be our guest! Although shortened, this second case study resembles some of the interactive exercises we use in our in-house CEM workshops.
Vueling is Iberia’s Barcelona based low cost affiliate, competing head-to-head with ultra LCC Ryanair and financially ailing (and therefore unpredictable) Star Alliance member Spanair, whose low-fare, “full-service”, broken-hub value proposition is beyond my (and most customers’) understanding. Additionally, it also has to attend certain needs of its corporate parent, Iberia.
Vueling serves three main segments with three clearly differentiated value propositions in this very tricky competitive and corporate environment.
1) The lowest-fare customer segment. The marketing communication for VFR/leisure customers is fun and price oriented. As Southwest Airlines proved back in the 1970s, fun can be a great marketing differentiator.
Workshop exercise:
Watch the following promotional video.
It creates an interesting, yet risky, expectation baseline based on intangibles like “fun”, “cool”, “young” and “hip”.
Suggestions for personal reflection or group discussion:
- Which specific customer expectations are created by this video?
- How do you translate “fun” attributes into rules, processes and sustainable employee attitudes?
- Can a clever positioning for one segment eventually have a negative spill-over effect on other market segments? Pay attention to the secondary details and messages of the video before responding.
- Has your company a comparable customer segment that could benefit from setting expectations by communicating intangible values? Why? How?
2) The business and professional customer segment. These passengers, self payers or from small/medium sized businesses, want a good price but are prepared to pay for a service. Vueling designed for them the GO! Service Pack, explained by a rather typical “product feature table”
Workshop exercise:
To better communicate the benefits, Vueling went the extra mile, producing this video:
Interesting, from “hip” to “efficient”.
Suggestions for personal reflection or group discussion:
- Which specific customer expectations are created by this video?
- What are the key differentiators vs. the ultra-low-cost competitor? The “full service” competitor?
- Is there a potential conflict with the previous segment? If yes, what could be the consequences?
- Has your company a comparable customer segment that could benefit from setting expectations by communicating intangible values? Why? How?
3) Iberia, Oneworld and other interline customers. Iberia puts its code on all Vueling flights, transfers occasionally routes to Vueling, shares its loyalty programme with Vueling and uses Vueling to feed its intercontinental flights to and from Barcelona.
While this is not a homogeneous customer segment, it requires a very specific kind of expectation management, consistent with that of its corporate parent. A special challenge is the prevention of eventual “disappointments” from customers who expected flying on an Iberia aircraft. As there is no objective reason to be disappointed (Vueling single class product is actually better than Iberia’s short/medium haul economy class), expectation management plays again an important role in avoiding a “negative value perception”.
Workshop exercise:
Admittedly, this group of customer is not really a “segment”, which could be the object of a specific communication effort, at least not without the active cooperation of Iberia.
It may be a bit far-fetched using this route launch video in this section, but, with this introduction, it is still possible to have an interesting discussion on how it positions Vueling.
- Why would Vueling want to produce this video? Does it appeal to any specific customer segments?
- Which specific customer expectations are created by this video?
Summing up
Of course, Vueling’s approach is risky. Its strong marketing messages set many implicit expectations that are eventually difficult to manage. Being a very marketing and financial performance driven company, it will need a special effort to deliver promises consistently.
We will finalise this combined “case-study / workshop” with a couple viral videos created with the participation of Vueling employees.
The first video is a tribute to flying related cinema scenes. The second one requires a comment to give credit to whom deserves credit: In 2009, Vueling employees already pioneered a viral video featuring a Bollywood style mass dancing choreography in the company Headquarters in Barcelona shortly before the famous “TAP dance”, normally considered the inventor of this genre, was released (TAP’s video achieved hundreds of thousands of views, helped by the perhaps more spectacular settings of the Lisbon airport).
Workshop exercise:
After watching the videos, relax, have a tea and don’t answer until you have reached a good emotional distance from the jokes and the music. Then ask youself:
- Would you want to fly with this airline?
- How do you visualize exactly their services, over the phone, at the airport, onboard, in case of a service disruption?
- Beyond creating a certain image and mind share, which benefits or risks implies producing this type of videos?
