Beyond the Familiar: Long-Term Growth through Customer Focus and Innovation by Patrick Barwise & Sean Meehan

Author:Patrick Barwise & Sean Meehan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-09-18T14:00:00+00:00

Customers expect innovation, fun, informality, honesty, value, and a caring attitude from VAA. This promise is reinforced at every customer touch point, from marketing materials and the call center to travel agents and, increasingly, travel websites. VAA scans these sites to learn what people are saying. Where there is misinformation, it rarely has to provide a correction, because site visitors themselves usually do so. VAA uses the data to check that the brand promise is both understood and relevant. It also works to keep all its social media activities true to and in support of the brand values. For instance, the most-read section of its Facebook page includes travel tips from crew members – communication that comes across as honest, informal, and caring.

For VAA – and for most companies – the biggest social media opportunity lies in gathering insights to drive continuous improvement. For instance, when it learned that its loyalty-scheme members were complaining online about tedious, redundant requests for security information, it created a secure opt-in service to eliminate the problem. In response to other online-community suggestions, it launched a system to arrange taxi sharing on arrival with passengers from the same flight. None of this represents a shift in strategy: the brand promise hasn’t changed, but social media dialogue has enabled VAA to keep improving its offer.

Again, Facebook interactions helped VAA appreciate an important but largely unrecognized segment: consumers planning a big trip. Their planning starts well in advance and involves extensive discussions with other travelers, so VAA launched V-Travelled, a site dedicated to inspirational journeys. Customers moderate the conversation and exchange information, stories, and advice. They can create a Trip Pod, a personal scrapbook of ideas for a dream trip. VAA enters the discussion using a traveler’s tone of voice, not pushing a product but offering advice. V-Travelled does lead to some sales, but its main benefit to VAA comes from brand reinforcement and novel customer insights.

Other incremental innovations emerging from VAA’s social networking include a loyalty scheme, Facebook Flight Status app (a first for any airline) and VAA’s first iPhone app, called Flight Tracker, which includes real-time aircraft positions – also a first for any airline.

We now turn to two aspects of the crucial, and much misunderstood, relationship between customer insights and innovation. This relationship varies between different contexts, specifically:

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