Brand, Buzz and Bookings

February 14, 2007, and a crippling ice storm descends upon New York City. JFK is laminated with thick ice. JetBlue, its largest single tenant, opts to keep flying during the storm. That turns out to be a bad decision. Flights taking off get stalled at the de-icing station for hours. The passengers can’t be returned to the gates because flights landing have taken those spaces. So the passengers of nine fully-loaded planes sit onboard, some for as long as 10 hours, without food and within sight of the terminal lounge. All in all, it took days for the airline to work through the flight delays caused by nature but made worse by the decision to keep flying.

JetBlue moved quickly to change things on the operational side after this “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.” But the incident, and the resulting flood of “JetBlueSucks.com” online vitriol, served as a wake-up call that the airline had some serious repair work to do on its image with the public.

“Your brand is like a bank,” says Marty St. George, at that time JetBlue’s vice president of planning for less than a year and now the company’s senior VP for marketing and commercial. “You put money in, that is, build it when times are good, so you can make withdrawals when they get tough. Feb. 14, 2007, was the first major withdrawal on the JetBlue brand bank account. We realized we’d let down our customers and our crew members.”

Brand Matters

The harm to JetBlue’s image was particularly apparent because the company had been established back in 2001 as an airline brand with a difference: a low-cost alternative flyer to the small number of cities it served, but with high-end amenities like leather upholstery, added legroom and seat-back entertainment.

“So many airlines really have not created brand positions for themselves,” says St. George, who worked at a handful of other commercial airlines before landing with JetBlue. Past focus groups with passengers convinced him that they couldn’t distinguish among American Airlines, United, Delta and the other big players. Asked to talk about the specific brands, “they immediately went into attributes like a hub in Dallas, or the routes they fly,” he says. “Nothing about the brand itself.

“JetBlue was founded with the notion that we would have a brand position and try to stake out a territory for ourselves. Our brand is stamped in our DNA. So after February 14, 2007, we had to re-engage our customers. ‘We know we screwed up, here’s our plan to fix it, and this is a bump in the road of a very long relationship between you and us.’”

At the time, that meant e-mailing every name in the JetBlue database with an apology, offers of reimbursement, and the promise of a new commitment to transparency. But three years on, JetBlue has elevated the game of customer engagement into areas, mostly digital, that were only faint glimmerings back in mid-2007.

Digital Assets

That online evolution has been a boon in all the areas that make up the marketing mantra of St. George’s team: brand, buzz and bookings. In other words, engage customers with the brand; get them excited about travel and passionate about flying with JetBlue; and then get them to buy a ticket and go.

Besides the main JetBlue.com Web site, the airline also operates a Facebook page with 330,000 likes. And JetBlue runs not one but two Twitter accounts: one main one, @JetBlue, with about 1.5 million followers, and one, @JetBlueCheeps, devoted to promoting short-term and last-minute discount fares. The latter has about 90,000 followers.

Working in digital channels makes both behavioral and demographic sense for the company. “We think we have the highest percentage of customers who book online [among U.S. airlines],” St. George points out. “Probably about three-quarters of our customers come to us on JetBlue.com. So digital’s a pretty natural place for us to reach our customers.

“It also matches our customer base, which skews younger and more affluent than many of our competitors. They’re online and, according to our competitive analyses, they’re much more engaged in social media than the competitors’ customers. So we’re really following our customers, rather than leading them into digital.”

Doing so much marketing online brings the benefit of accountability. St. George says online marketing is “incredibly easy to measure” and to do cost-assessments inside.

“You can do all kinds of testing on different creative and different sites, trying to find the vehicles that are most effective. From a cost-per-click perspective, we can look at every single [Web ad] insertion and transfer it through to a cost-per-booking at the end of the day.”

Digital’s also a plus from an operational standpoint. Many of the complaints and customer-relations questions that would normally get shunted to a call center at a bigger airline are commonly handled from within the @JetBlue Twitter account — easing the burden on phone banks while at the same time underlining the airline’s transparency and responsiveness.

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“Why Fly the Other Guy?”

But marketing from within social media has the large disadvantage of talking primarily to the converted. JetBlue, which flies some 25 million customers a year, is faced with the problem of growing that user base, both in the outlying airports it serves and even in hub cities like New York and Boston.

“When I fly JetBlue, I usually introduce myself and engage the passengers on the flight over the P.A.,” says St. George. “I often ask how many people are on their first flight with us, and it’s normal to see 50, 60, 70 people out of 150 raise their hands.”

That’s a frustration for JetBlue: that so many prospects are resisting the appeal of what research indicates is a superior customer flying experience.

“We know we provide a great product,” he says. “But in the real world, customers are still using our competitors. There’s a lot of inertia in the flying space. As a joke, we’ve dreamed about being able to grab customers by the lapels and ask them, ‘Why are you still flying those other guys?’ Just to shake them out of their habits.”

Instead of committing assault, St. George and his team are pursuing a vigorous policy of sampling, promoting limited-time, low-cost deals that both tempt JetBlue newbies to sample its wares and garner some eye-popping buzz in the media at the same time. Online ads as well as social postings regularly hold out the promise of $5 and $10 fares to customers who can move quickly.

Such discounting isn’t always possible because JetBlue’s flights, like those of the other guys these days, are often full. But when he can, St. George likes to make sure that available seats are being priced to encourage sampling among people who haven’t tried the airline before.

“We’ve got to find ways to create trial,” he says. “Our research shows that if we can get them on the airplane once, there’s a significantly higher chance of getting them for a second, third or fourth trip. We can spend a lot of energy getting customers in the airplane because we can be confident that the experience will make them want to do it again.”

All You Can Jet

Last September, JetBlue put on a real burst of marketing speed with “All You Can Jet,” a promotion offering a limited number of passes that let customers pay a $700 flat fee for a month’s unlimited travel ($500 for a pass excluding Friday or Sunday travel) to any of the destinations JetBlue serves in the U.S. and the Caribbean. The only restriction was that users had to book their flights before early October, thereby picking up the slack in a traditionally slow post-Labor Day travel period.

And slack was indeed picked up. JetBlue won’t release how many passes were sold, or how quickly they were snapped up. But the program was successful enough, both in sampling and in buzz creation, that St. George’s team brought it back in mid-August of this year, with the same travel window.

“In terms of trialing, it’s become the single biggest trial program we do,” he said, speaking on the second day of the 2010 promotional sale. While he won’t release total sale numbers for the 2009 campaign — “we kind of like the mystery” — he said that of last year’s All You Can Jet bookers, 50% had never flown the airline before. And as expected, company research showed that a strong proportion of those newcomers came back and used JetBlue again.

Response to the 2009 promotion was all the more remarkable because JetBlue did virtually nothing to publicize it. “We sent out a $500 press release, tweeted it and put it on Facebook. Basically we spent zero dollars on that promotion.”

In paid media, perhaps, but All You Can Jet got plenty of attention from the press. Wired magazine bought a pass and sent a staffer, Brendan Ross, to spend 30 days traveling around the country as “Terminal Man,” never getting farther from a plane than the terminal, and without any baggage. Ross then blogged and tweeted about his experiences.

Another marathon passenger, Nathan Black, blogged about his trip too but went further: He got a tattoo of the airport code for each of the seven cities he reached. Other press coverage told of small start-up businesses able to mount venture-capital road shows.

Net Promoter scores for JetBlue reached their 2009 peak after the All You Can Jet campaign, St. George says — and not just among passengers, but with crew members, too. “Our crews reported being proud about working for a company that does such cool things. They had customers talking to them about how happy they were to buy the pass and how it let them realize their dreams or business goals.

One difference in this year’s promotion is the addition of a dedicated Facebook page that permits the AYCJ buyers to connect easily with one another. “We found last year that these people were linking up on their own via Twitter and MeetUp.com, so we set up a special online destination,” says St. George. “We think we have a unique opportunity to be the glue that helps these customers talk to each other.”

For the Fans

It’s not all about the first-timers, of course. JetBlue has made large moves in the last year to consolidate its standing with committed fans, too. Perhaps the most notable is a revamp of its frequent-flyer loyalty program a year ago. Relaunched in September 2009, TrueBlue got rid of blackout dates for redemptions, extended the lifespan of reward points, and shifted them from a miles-flown basis (which favored long-distance travelers) to rewarding dollars spent.

JetBlue maintains an ongoing dialogue with customers, but this required more formal thought. So Dave Canty, director of loyalty marketing and partnerships, put the loyalty overhaul in front of a panel of 15,000 JetBlue users.

“Moving from a distance to a revenue model was the biggest change they said they wanted to see,” Canty says. “In the current difficult economy, travel spending is becoming much more an issue for people. So we made that change and incorporated some accelerators, to ensure that people didn’t feel they were being penalized for flying on shorter trips with lower fares.” In other words, the company made the loyalty experience suit the flying experience: low cost, but with fun added.

And while it does not yet run a smartphone app of its own, JetBlue was able to tap into the use of mobile devices in a travel-specific way earlier this year with a contest running inside the Gate Guru app, which maps airports and offers to locate all the services a consumer might want while in transit.

For three months this summer, the promotion offered a $100 JetBlue gift card to the traveler who checked in most frequently during each month on Gate Guru, an iPhone app that operates only within airports. The national winner, as featured on a leaderboard within the app, won two free tickets on the airline.

“Like any travel player we’re looking at mobile strategies,” says Fiona Morrison, director of brand and advertising. “And from our mobile check-in site we can tell that a huge proportion of our customers have iPhones. When Gate Guru came to us, we thought this was something we could learn from. Even as a promotion, it would teach us broadly how people responded over mobile devices.”

Given JetBlue’s digital bent and fast-moving clientele, can a smartphone app — like that of another low-cost airline player — be far behind?

“No comment,” she laughs. “But stay tuned.”