On a recent trip, I flew on an airline that I hadn’t used in a very long time. It had the cheapest fare, and since I wasn’t going to be flying first class, I figured it didn’t matter. In my mind, coach is coach, and it’s pretty much a commodity at this point. I truly didn’t worry about which carrier it was. Hindsight being 20/20, I wish I could go back in time and change my decision. On the other hand, I got to see a real life example of why the timing and concept of a marketing message is important, and how doing it wrong can potentially have a negative effect. My intent here isn’t to bash my flight experience, but it provides the context for the sales offer I heard.
I’m a tall guy, not freakishly so, but tall enough that I am extremely uncomfortable in places like movie theaters, the back seats of cars, and of course coach airline seats. The seats are measured to accommodate waists, not shoulders, so they are inadequate for anyone older than middle school kids if you don’t want to touch the person next to you or get hit by every single person walking down the aisle of the plane if you have the aisle seat, which I did. So after nearly three hours of getting hit, rubbing shoulders with the guy next to me, and getting irritated by the frequency of annoying interruptions/announcements over the intercom trying to sell me a variety of lunches and beverages, I was treated to a nearly four minute announcement that could not have made me feel worse about my flight. I spent the last few minutes of time, when using electronic devices was still allowed, to hear an offer for their frequent flier mileage credit card – complete with the promise of a large number of miles added to the account if I filled out the application today.
I think the best time to try and approach someone for a loyalty program is when they’ve had a positive experience, or at least a potentially positive experience, not after three hours of near misery. Perhaps I’m being melodramatic, but the anecdotal evidence I have points to the fact that most people don’t usually have a great flying experience. Since everything about the flight both physically, and from an aesthetic point of view (the plane was dirty and they were too cheap to have any video monitors) wasn’t great, I was left wondering, “Why would I inflect more of this on myself?”
This brings me of course to the inevitable insurance tie-in. While this airline was cheerfully trying to sell me more misery, it occurred to me that insurance as a product tries to alleviate misery and suffering by providing the resources to make you whole after what is usually a horrible experience. What I found interesting here was that insurance companies in general and this particular airline had opposite strategies. Insurance companies try to sell you in advance of a horrible experience, largely needing you to imagine or remember a bad event, in order to sell you products that help heal and restore you to where you were before the event. While at the same time, this airline was trying to sell me on the opportunity for more experiences like the one I just had without taking into account that it might be a bad experience and would reinforce that experience rather than alleviate it.
Can you change outcomes and build on sales opportunities if you change your timing? It would be worth a shot to find out. I wonder what would happen if insurance companies used the context of a bad experience, like an auto accident, to update and cross sell products like supplemental health and life insurance – that hasn’t happened to people I know that have been in accidents. And conversely, if the airline had tried to sell me a loyalty program at the start of the flight after getting settled in and might be in a better mood and more receptive to a well-tailored sales pitch. Perhaps opportunities lie in the “when”, and not always the “What” or “Why.”