FEBRUARY 17-18, 2005
Right Brain Emotes Customer Loyalty
for Airline Programs with new Brand Strategies

Right Brain Branding Consultants have joined airline consultants Airline Information to sponsor the first ever Frequent Flier Program (FFP 2005) conference being held in Madrid this February. The conference has gathered the world’s leading experts in airline customer loyalty who will be presenting topics such as Defining a clear FFP strategy, Emotional Customer Loyalty and Valuing FFP Currency and Partnerships.  The world-class conference has been designed specifically for airline Frequent Flyer Program and Loyalty Managers and could not have come at a better time.

Roger Williams, former Loyalty Manager for Air Jamaica and chairman of the 50-year-old Interline Sales & Marketing Conference explains: “What a lot of people don’t realise is that FFP managers control the world’s most valuable consumer databases. This conference aims to deliver an agenda which will make their respective programs powerful beyond measure”.

President of sponsoring firm Right Brain Branding Consultants, Tim Pedersen comments, “This is a crucial time for the industry.  American Airlines first established frequent flier programs over 20 years ago as a marketing ploy to build and retain customer loyalty. And with one in three American adults involved in some type of point accumulation, there is a huge market of consumers depending on this loyalty promise to be fulfilled. However, with new price cutting strategies deployed by Delta in the first week of January, those promises are will become more and more difficult to fulfill and may leave loyal consumers surfing up better deals.”

Our company creates brand strategies for companies to fulfill their promise to consumers and create brand loyalty. This new strategy by Delta could have a huge impact on the industry as other carriers scramble to adjust in this commodity modeled industry. In essence, the infrequent traveler will have something to gain as prices begin to adjust, however the real loser is the brand loyal flier who chose an airline not because of a relative price, but because of point accumulation. 

Establishing and sustaining market leadership through a low-price strategy can be difficult and very risky.  Airlines that compete solely on discounts often fail to understand the role pricing should play in their brand’s overall value proposition.

There is a real opportunity here for airlines to begin working on differentiation, looking beyond the price and building their brand promise.  This is not a new theory, but a time proven strategy laid out in 1980 in the Harvard Business Review. They sited a report from William Hull which compared companies that stressed differentiation with companies that competed on cost. Hands down, in every relevant measure such as return on equity, return on capital and average revenue growth rate, the differentiators beat the money crunchers every single time.

Unfortunately, this strategy seems to be too much of a risk for airlines and their commodity driven plans. Economic times deepen their convictions. Those that have caught on, differentiators such as Jet Blue and Southwest, go flying by.