Advertising the value of a flight: lessons from the railway
A new campaign from UK rail-co LNER is highly relevant for airlines
Are planes and trains more or less the same? One flies through the air. The other flies along rails. Both carry hundreds of passengers. Both can be delayed. Life-timers in either industry no doubt hold strong views on the unique characteristics of their specialist mode of transport.
But from a passenger’s perspective they both solve the same problem – how can I get where I need to go fast and without needing to drive myself? For this reason all airlines should consider LNER’s latest advert.
LNER is my local rail operator. Last year I rode on their trains 42 times, moving safely and swiftly between my places in London and the north east of England, plus a couple of regional shuttles. By and large LNER do a good job and the three hour ride is if anything slightly too short.
A typical ride in first class has comfy seats, one drinks run per hour and a hot meal if you want one. All seats come with spectacular views of Durham Cathedral, arguably the greatest building in the world, and a pleasant jaunt through the English countryside.
Not bad for an average of £105 return in first class (I get a 34% discount with my railcard).
The app works well and I normally get my favourite seat with their advance selection tool. The loyalty scheme needs improvement – everybody gets 2% and my frequent travel is not rewarded in any way. Critically, they are good at getting things right when they go wrong (see my article at Ink). I have been a regular customer on their line since I was 15.
LNER’s latest ‘Freedom all the way’ ad campaign, launched in Jan this year, really struck home for me as relevant for airlines. It features a puppet called Eleanor (sounds like LNER… geddit!) on a journey in standard class, pointing out everything that the passengers around her can do on the train.
You can watch the video here:
Here is what we see with Eleanor:
1. Eleanor reading a magazine
2. A couple travelling together, listening to music
3. A chap having a sleep
4. A young family of four playing cards
5. Three busy business folks looking at a pie chart
6. A group enjoying beer and sandwiches from the buffet
7. A trendy lass mixing music on a stencilled-up laptop
8. A mobile phone user
9. A newspaper reader
10. Two people having a conversation
11. Fashionable girls with glasses of rose
12. A Granddad and his grandson off to the footer, Toon Army Newcastle United by the looks of the black & white scarf, a stop on the LNER route (howay the lads! – Ed)
13. A knitter
14. A couple taking selfies
15. A traffic jam OUTSIDE the train
16. Eleanor grooving on the ceiling (!) before having a coffee delivered to her seat.
That is a lot of content in less than a minute. I thought that LNER did a great job with it.
What I really liked about this is they show everything that the journey itself offers to people like you and many others. They did not focus on the destination or too much on avoiding the hassle of being stuck in traffic. Travel with LNER is presented as a desirable experience in itself.
And all of this is done with the standard class product and service. According to the ad, you don’t have to be in first class to have a great journey. I think it is a fair and accurate representation of what the railway offers 95% of the time.
The sheer variety of activities presented is interesting. Most people will relate to reading a paper, having a chat and a glass of wine in the afternoon. Or having a snooze to recover from an early start. Not everybody will be business travellers, knitters, music mixers or football fans, but their characters will help people remember the ad.
Long-term readers of Airline Revenue Economics may remember my article about my LOOP (LOPA Optimisation) tool (see article). I use this to help airlines figure out how to configure aircraft.
As part of the process I model the on-board behaviour of nine passenger archetypes:
1. Long sleepers zonked out (in LNER’s ad!)
2. Busy workers going clackety-clack on their laptops (in LNER’s ad!)
3. Device lovers glued to their phones (in LNER’s ad!)
4. Popcorn fiends who fill the flight with movies
5. Restless souls who cannot settle down and flit from one activity to another
6. Parents looking after their kids (in LNER’s ad!)
7. Young children not asleep (in LNER’s ad!)
8. Youths on tour (in LNER’s ad!)
9. The groggy and the sick
Six of my nine are directly featured in LNER’s ad. You can easily understand why the others are not there.
It can be interesting to build some behaviour models around each of them, for example the probability that somebody in each group will be asleep or awake at a certain time leading to an analysis of how valuable the bed is (see article). This tells me how important different aspects of the hard and soft product are likely to be on specific flight profiles.
Given a network for an airline, fleet or sub-fleet, LOOP then tells me on average how important different product attributes are for that airline. An essential element of service design. Clearly LNER have done the same.
Back in my Qatar Airways days we created a concept based on similar ideas, a campaign called ‘The Art of Flight Redefined’. You can see the video here:
It also features passenger archetype-style characters:
1. The German CEO on a business trip to Doha
2. The young Qatari couple off to London
3. The Swiss lady getting surprise tickets in the post*
4. The family in Singapore with a football-mad son travelling to see friends in Barcelona.
* Spot the mistake: her ticket at 0:33 says economy and is presented in a first class wallet, but she travels in business! I remember personally going down to the ticket office to source economy, business and first class ticket wallets!!
One of my jobs was to dig into the airline’s revenue accounting data to find these archetypes. Other important market segments not included were:
5. Japanese travellers off to South America, one of the most important routes for the airline at the time
6. Weekend-breakers in the middle east
7. Europe <> India traffic
8. African traders
7. Labourers
8. Almost anyone in economy. :eek:
These are all quite different people to those shown by LNER. But LNER is focused on the UK market and the East Coast Mainline in particular. The principle is the same and that is what matters.
There are many other ways to successfully advertise an airline. British Airways often highlights it’s heritage. Singapore Airlines it’s cabin service. United Airlines owns the rights to George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ to provide a signature sound.
So why is this one worth an article here on Airline Revenue Economics?
Put simply, it is about understanding how aircraft cabins deliver value. Airlines designing seats, cabins and services need to know what people are doing on-board to get things right. Then revenue managers need to know about how people derive value from the on-board experience to forecast demand and set prices appropriately.
All airlines have a clear idea about what they are doing product-wise and revenue management-wise. But only a few link the two. Questions that need to be asked include:
1. How does the flight schedule and the mix of direct/connecting passengers determine whether people value a flat bed vs a seat’s work, dining or entertainment facilities?
2. What is the value of a passenger’s time that is saved by taking a more direct flight or, if overnight, a flight that they can sleep on & how is this dependent on whether they are business or leisure travellers?
3. Can a new catering service have a quantifiable impact on demand, fed into yield through the revenue management system, or a direct impact on willingness to pay that can be monetised by pricing?
4. Who are the most loyal passengers & how they should be rewarded? (hint: frequent flyers are not loyal if their flights are chosen by somebody else)
oliver AT ransonpricing DOT com