In 1997, British Airways recognized an opportunity to penetrate the “low cost” sector of the airline industry in UK & Europe. In 1998 British Airways launched Go Fly; managed by a small team and led by existing BA executive Barbara Cassani.
Go identified business travelers and leisure travelers as their target market(s). A focused business scope and the development of clear and unambiguous objectives provided two success characteristics; a clear line of sight and an ideal that a consumable brand will be formed from. All stakeholders were able to see what was important to their target market, and how it will be delivered.
Go’s management determined that the business needed to achieve the following objectives so to position itself optimally in the marketplace.
Offer flights at a low price
Offer regular flights
Offer reliability and punctuality
Offer reasonable comfort for the price
The communication of Go’s promise and ability to deliver was realized by doing the following:
Advertising and communication intended to create a clean, functional, simple identity
Partnership with Costa Coffee, a brand name associated with good coffee (in-flight snacks and hot drinks)
Consistently delivered on regularity of flights and punctuality
They also recognized it to be possible to capitalize on customer centric acceptable tradeoffs to provide low cost flights and reasonable comfort:
It was acceptable to reduce passenger leg room
Higher capacity planes
It was acceptable to offer meals for purchase
It was acceptable only to use secondary airports, where services are typically less comprehensive
Seat allocation was an acceptable practice – makes for a civilized passenger experience with less crowding
It was reasonable to ask cabin staff to clean the aircraft
Use of 737’s only
Offering incentive for use of debit card
Use of internet and telephone ticketless booking system managed in-house
Appropriately, all of the executable were tied to key performance indicators measuring the health and performance of the business operation. British Airways claimed to have made an excellent return on its initial investment of £25m, over the three years it owned the airline. In 2002 Go was sold to rival easyJet for £374m. Merged with Go, easyJet is now Europe’s largest low-cost airline. The fine quality of the company’s corporate and brand strategy is validated by the huge growth in Go’s value in a relatively short period of time
This post is based upon a case written by Professor Alexander Roberts & Andrew F. MacLennan
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