Are you reading this in the departure lounge, en route to an Easter break? If like me you’ve chosen to fly with Ryanair, I suspect you will judge the experience by the ease of airport parking, the length of the security queue and whether they play that fanfare signalling ‘another on-time arrival’. Anything approaching decent cabin service will come as a bonus: you’ll hear things like ‘Gosh, these girls work hard considering they’re paid next to nothing’ or ‘Actually, this lasagne’s not bad for a fiver.’ Four years into a marketing programme called Always Getting Better, supposedly about being nicer to customers, the genius of the Ryanair model is that we still don’t expect pleasantness so long as we get cheapness and punctuality — and we laugh at the chutzpah of chief executive Michael O’Leary when we read headlines like ‘Ryanair threatens to double passenger fee for babies’.
Compare all this with British Airways, which long since ceased to be ‘the world’s favourite airline’, but resisted the no-frills revolution by continuing to present itself as a paragon of customer care, maintaining a slightly camp Home Counties tone to its cabin service that can feel 30 years out of date. Consumers’ criteria for judging BA are, I suggest, the opposite of those for Ryanair: never mind the delay, enjoy the in-flight entertainment and the elegant crockery. But now the national flag-carrier is reinventing itself as ‘British Bareways’ (says the Sun) by selling M&S sandwiches instead of offering free meals on short-haul flights, and threatening to do likewise on long-haul — while reducing leg-room and outdoing O’Leary for brutality by barring an elderly female passenger from using the toilet.
It’s a business-school case study in managing expectations. If your hallmark is comfort and courtesy, lower fares will never compensate customers for cuts and slip-ups. If your selling proposition is ruthless low-cost efficiency, play that on-time fanfare and you’ll be forgiven for everything else.
This is an extract from Martin Vander Weyer’s ‘Any Other Business’, which appears in this week’s Spectator
Comments