branding

JetBlue auctions = full planes, free public relations, value for consumers

So I was catching up on a couple of my favourite blogs when I came across a mention on a JetBlue campaign at Jaffe Juice* which caught my eye. Courtesy of a wire news story, the piece covers a campaign that I think just raised the bar a little bit when it comes to what low cost carriers are up to.

Coming from Malaysia, we’re the home base for Asia’s fastest growing low cost carrier. This gives us a front row seat on their extensive marketing campaigns and the on-going battle with the established national carrier and other airlines in the region. Their perceptual issues, my personal views on them or their successes/failures aside, they (the Malaysian low cost carrier I’m referring to) have been very effective at generating full loads, great publicity and a frenzy of sorts through a series of ticket give-aways. These involve millions of tickets at a time and have happened a couple of times over the last few years.

Thing is however - they use paid advertising to get the message across. While they - like JetBlue - get their surcharges and taxes paid for, the tickets themselves are essentially free. JetBlue on the other hand aren’t (to my knowledge) paying for advertising for this specific campaign, relying instead on word of mouth marketing to do the trick for them. Also, they’re apparently recouping almost the entire cost of the tickets/ packages and still benefitting from the a greater awareness of their brand, products/ services and prices.

It’s clearly a case of PR doing some good things for them while generating the potential for additional sales - without extensive advertising!

So how does this work? Well, JetBlue is essentially auctioning off more then 300 round trip flights and six vacation packages on eBay with opening bids set between 5 and 10 cents. Now this alone will - as Harlan Platt, a finance professor at Northeastern University who follows the airline industry noted - provide some valuable word of mouth advertising for the carrier.

Think about it for a minute.

• It’s subtle
• It’s a lot of bang for very little effort or investment on the part of the carrier
• It adds value to your consumers
• You just know that people who know about it are going to tell their friends about it too
• It gives customers something without really costing the carrier all that much
• It’s likely to have a direct and positive impact on sales in the short term

What other examples do you know of that offer consumers great benefits, have cost the company’s very little, uses little if any advertising and is a ‘generally good/ great/ innovative campaign’ in your eyes?

Tags: branding, low cost carrier, marketing, pr, sales, word of mouth