“Behaviour that’s admired is the path to power among people everywhere.”
Beowulf tr. by Seamus Heaney
I travel frequently to Ireland. When possible I prefer to fly with Aer Lingus, the Irish flag carrier. In recent years Aer Lingus has re-invented itself as a low-cost airline, though one not completely without frills. It did this in response to RyanAir of course, and there is much to admire about RyanAir, at least from the safe comfort of my office.
One of frills it seems to manage without is the milk of human kindness, or even civility, generally considered essential in a service business. It is possible to complete a journey with RyanAir without a single member of its staff looking at you or acknowledging your presence. All this may be unremarkable to people who fly once or twice a year, but it isn’t acceptable to me. I prefer Aer Lingus, which, as I said, still has a few frills like airport lounges, frequent flyer programmes, accurate timetables and pleasant staff.
So imagine my recent discomfiture when I had a big row with an Aer Lingus check in guy at Heathrow about the weight of my carry-on bag. At that time Aer Lingus had a rule restricting the weight of carry-on luggage to 5 Kilos. My briefcase weighed 10 Kilos, but I couldn’t check it because it contained my computer. A typical Aer Lingus employee would have looked at my frequent flyer card and winked me through, I know because they had done it lots of time. This guy, however, had “jobsworth” written all over his smug, estuary face.
This is what I mean by a bad thing happening to a good brand. If he had worked for RyanAir I would probably have handed my bag over with meek resignation, insisting, perhaps, that they put a “fragile” sticker on it. But he didn’t work for RyanAir, he worked for AerLingus the brand I give my loyalty to, and so I fought back vigorously.
There’s a seeming paradox here, the airline that normally treats me badly I put up with, whereas I complain to the airline that normally treats me well when I perceive that they are treating me badly. But if we think of a brand, from the customer’s point of view, as a set of expectations then, of course this is not a paradox at all. I expect RyanAir to behave badly and so I am not perturbed when they do, in fact it merely reinforces my poor expectations. On the other hand I expect Aer Lingus to behave well and it upsets me when they do not.
In this interpretation, then, a brand is an expectation of future satisfaction based on a string of positive experiences. One bad experience won’t destroy the equity of a good brand, particularly if the customer regards the experience as an aberration or atypical. A string of bad experiences, however, forces the customer to revise their expectations.
In the case of my Aer Lingus experience I was inclined to regard my antagonist as one bad apple in the barrel, there’s always one. In fact I thought that Aer Lingus staff had coped superbly with their near death experience at hands of RyanAir. Aer Lingus’s survival plan meant that 50% of staff were laid off, but that never affected how I was treated, the smile never slipped. On the other hand they started to introduce extra charges, golf clubs had to be paid for, coffee on board had to be paid for, and now new rules about carry on baggage. Was my brush with the Heathrow jobsworth a sign of things to come? Were passengers being progressively reduced from human beings to marks if not, in the RyanAir worldview, mugs and nuisances?
Beowulf tr. by Seamus Heaney
I travel frequently to Ireland. When possible I prefer to fly with Aer Lingus, the Irish flag carrier. In recent years Aer Lingus has re-invented itself as a low-cost airline, though one not completely without frills. It did this in response to RyanAir of course, and there is much to admire about RyanAir, at least from the safe comfort of my office.
One of frills it seems to manage without is the milk of human kindness, or even civility, generally considered essential in a service business. It is possible to complete a journey with RyanAir without a single member of its staff looking at you or acknowledging your presence. All this may be unremarkable to people who fly once or twice a year, but it isn’t acceptable to me. I prefer Aer Lingus, which, as I said, still has a few frills like airport lounges, frequent flyer programmes, accurate timetables and pleasant staff.
So imagine my recent discomfiture when I had a big row with an Aer Lingus check in guy at Heathrow about the weight of my carry-on bag. At that time Aer Lingus had a rule restricting the weight of carry-on luggage to 5 Kilos. My briefcase weighed 10 Kilos, but I couldn’t check it because it contained my computer. A typical Aer Lingus employee would have looked at my frequent flyer card and winked me through, I know because they had done it lots of time. This guy, however, had “jobsworth” written all over his smug, estuary face.
This is what I mean by a bad thing happening to a good brand. If he had worked for RyanAir I would probably have handed my bag over with meek resignation, insisting, perhaps, that they put a “fragile” sticker on it. But he didn’t work for RyanAir, he worked for AerLingus the brand I give my loyalty to, and so I fought back vigorously.
There’s a seeming paradox here, the airline that normally treats me badly I put up with, whereas I complain to the airline that normally treats me well when I perceive that they are treating me badly. But if we think of a brand, from the customer’s point of view, as a set of expectations then, of course this is not a paradox at all. I expect RyanAir to behave badly and so I am not perturbed when they do, in fact it merely reinforces my poor expectations. On the other hand I expect Aer Lingus to behave well and it upsets me when they do not.
In this interpretation, then, a brand is an expectation of future satisfaction based on a string of positive experiences. One bad experience won’t destroy the equity of a good brand, particularly if the customer regards the experience as an aberration or atypical. A string of bad experiences, however, forces the customer to revise their expectations.
In the case of my Aer Lingus experience I was inclined to regard my antagonist as one bad apple in the barrel, there’s always one. In fact I thought that Aer Lingus staff had coped superbly with their near death experience at hands of RyanAir. Aer Lingus’s survival plan meant that 50% of staff were laid off, but that never affected how I was treated, the smile never slipped. On the other hand they started to introduce extra charges, golf clubs had to be paid for, coffee on board had to be paid for, and now new rules about carry on baggage. Was my brush with the Heathrow jobsworth a sign of things to come? Were passengers being progressively reduced from human beings to marks if not, in the RyanAir worldview, mugs and nuisances?
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