It is nice to be happy but it is more usual to be unhappy. Marketing professionals therefore aim to make you feel better.
Nowhere is this truer than of flying. By all accounts it is a horrid experience, for one reason or the other.
In fact, it is no different from going into hospital. Fear, tension, indifference, loss of volition – they share a lot of features.
So traditionally, airlines and airports have tried to make you think flying is heaven on earth. And the greater the number of airlines and airports there have been, the harder they have gone at it.
Airports being ‘natural' monopolies have had to try less hard. But airlines have always had to compete for bottoms. And, ever since the Great US Deregulation of 1978, they have had to try harder.
India has been a latecomer to the game. Although competition was allowed from 1993, it took off properly only around 2002.
As economists say, the demand curve gradually flattened out. This means competition became intense.
All airlines were selling the same thing: Misery. But the key to getting more passengers lay in minimising it. There were two ways of doing it.
One was to sell you the promise of a great time in the air. The other was to sell you the promise of putting you out of your misery quickly.
Kingfisher opted for the former; Indigo opted for the latter. Kingfisher's promise involved a lot of extra costs; the Indigo promise didn't.
Who was right?
So who got it right in purely branding terms?
The answer lies not just in the airborne experience; it also lies in the airport experience. In India, it does so with knobs on.
This is because barring Delhi's T-3, the rest (Mumbai included) are hell-holes through which you are forced to pass.
Air India, as behoves a PSU, couldn't be bothered. Nor, surprisingly, was Jet. The rest simply offered you cheap tickets.
Indigo's branding strategy had an extra element: Punctuality. This also helped it reduce costs.
In sum, it not only offered you a cheap flight but also a quick departure-airport-to-arrival-car transit. The strategy seems to have worked better than that of the rest.
Branding joint products
The above narration, I think, offers an interesting example of branding what economics calls joint products. These are things that get produced together whether you want them or not and are of almost equal importance. Thus, if you heat crude oil, you get kerosene, diesel, petrol, naphtha and what not. If you heat milk you get butter, ghee, cheese, and the like.
In the case of aviation, airports and airlines happen together. Moreover, the two are of roughly equal importance.
From a branding point of view, they are more difficult, because although they happen together and are similar in importance, unlike milk and cheese or petrol and naphtha, they have to be kept in mind while selling.
The takeaway
Kingfisher's cardinal mistake was to ignore this aspect and sell only the airborne experience — namely, hospitality.
Indigo sold itself — without intending to, I am sure, because I am certain it did not consult an economist — as a joint product.
Brand professionals should consult professional economists who can give them additional insights into the products they are trying to sell.
If you must fool the customer, why not put some brains into it?
(T.C.A Srinivasa-Raghavan is Senior Associate Editor, Business Line.)