Ready for Takeoff (washingtonpost.com)
Speaking about customer evangelists, Southwest Airlines is often mentioned as the ‘fun airline’. We’ll see what happens as more low cost airlines enter the market and the big guys reinvent themselves.
From the article: “As we looked into it, all of this was really pointing to the fact that this was an intelligent risk to take and exciting opportunity to put our brand out there where we might not normally be,” Rutherford says.
Congratulations are in order
reprinted from my post to the AdMarketing list
Hi everyone–
Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, of Creating Customer Evangelists know like many of us that customers are one of the best sales or marketing forces a company can have. The trick is to turn best customers into evangelists and then leverage through word-of-mouth marketing.
Creating Customer Evangelists has just published “Testify!”, a free ebook. The book profiles 18 organizations and their customer evangelism efforts. Two AdMarketers are featured in the book! Congratulations to Bloomberg Marketing and MarketingSherpa are in order! Mitch
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Older Airlines Embrace New Sales Tactics
Older Airlines Embrace New Sales Tactics (washingtonpost.com)
Like everyone else, I spend a fair amount of time chatting about ‘integrated’ marketing programs or those that include traditional and interactive tactics. Here’s an article that talks about street tactics used by low cost airlines entering the Washington, DC market. Now, if the low cost guys would add viral marketing to the mix- then we’d have some excitement!
Interesting quote: “The low-fare carriers are forcing this change,” said B. Ben Baldanza, US Airways’ senior vice president of marketing and planning. “We need to not only tell people what we’re doing but remind them that we’re not the same company we were.”