I love travelling.
I’m not really fond of taking the plane, but I’m not scared of it. But there is one thing that I don’t like, or at least I just don’t really care for (and I guess 99% of the population agree), which is the safety announcement before taking off. You have been waiting for your trip to Hawaii for almost half a year, and a boring (and bored) cabin crew member delays your arrival to the white sand beach by the longest 5 minutes of your life…
Virgin America recently found a very interesting way to change this (boring) moment into a very engaging one: by launching a pre-flight safety video which is actually a real musical!
That was the subject of Jeffery’s 4th Blog Post, which really caught my attention compared to other Blogs I visited.
Airline companies currently have two main kinds of differentiation strategies: either lowering their prices, or increasing their service quality. But once they have positioned themselves in one of these strategies, how do they attract new customers? How do they continue to maintain the loyalty of the current ones?
By launching this video, Virgin America reinvented the (boring) safety video, common to any airline company, even making it into a new asset and a way to differentiate themselves from their competition.
This won’t increase the service quality, lower the prices, or change anything within the company, but it will instead create a huge Internet hit, and appeal to people who didn’t know about, or haven’t flown with Virgin America before. Because travelers will associate a positive emotion to the company after watching this video, they are more likely to fly with this airline instead of a random unknown airline.
This is a perfect example of market penetration!