As I sit in the middle seat of an Air India flight, flying the same sector for the 6th time this month, I get asked ‘why the middle seat for a gold-class-status-toting frequent flyer?’ Because I couldn’t care enough to pay extra for the aisle, I say, as I think about my choices and I if I really have any. When it comes to domestic travel in India, I am not sure the answer to that question is a firm ‘yes’.
Enough about my Maharaja points. Let’s talk about Indigo (!) The poor dears responsible for 66% of all domestic travel around the largest democracy in the world, have just gone through what is one of the worst airline meltdowns of our times.
From angry memes to slogan shouting. From sobbing to climbing over counters, we’ve seen it all in the last few days. And who can blame the poor passengers after the ordeal they each have had to face.
What a brand this WAS. What a game changer. The brand promise is delivered through the striking visual language. The tongue in cheek humour and the warm welcomes. The smart outfits and the Junglee sandwiches.
And above all else, the efficiency! The value was immeasurable and so much beyond what money could buy.
It didn’t take too long for Indigo to become everyone’s favourite airline brand. No one missed Jet anymore. The joke continued to be on Air India.
How the mighty have fallen.
My personal experience tracks back to what I’ve noticed for the last few years before this episode, however. Broken seats, delayed flights, cranky staff, visible cost cutting and paid for cup-noodle boxes are only some of the ways the experience just hasn’t been the same as when it began.
So what can we learn from the Indigo story around experience-led brand building?
First and most important, experience alignment IS the single most important aspect of brand building. You can come up with the smartest tag lines and stories but if your customer experience doesn’t match up, those very tag lines will come back to bite you.
Second, a crisis situation is like an X-ray for your brand’s integrity. You can either make or break the brand at this time. Remember what James Burke, the J&J CEO did after the Tylenol case? In contrast, Indigo’s was a clear case of ‘passing the buck’.
Next, Frontline employees are your brand’s delivery vehicles. If they don’t represent your brand, the experience fails at the first point of contact. A lack of preparation, reactivity, transparency and most of all empathy are absolute MUSTS for every single staff member to uphold, regardless of where they show up.
Additionally, people remember the worst experiences the most. People don’t forget silence, confusion or worse, being treated as irrelevant. Brand building is all about managing these emotional touchpoints.
Lastly, apologies without action destroy your credibility even further. Every brand needs to ensure that the apology, that should be well timed, comes with evidence of change and improvement. Lip service is quite possibly a brand’s worst experience-led disaster, in an already crisis-ridden situation.
Indigo, like every other airline, is not a marketing-led business and brand alone. It is an operation-led experience. For this category, operation reliability IS brand strategy. Experience is everything. The lack of it, everything.
Note : All views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of AdTech Today.
