Easyjet Marketing Activities - Case Study

Promotional and Marketing Activities in Travel and Tourism

easyJet case study

source: www.easyjet.com © easyJet airline company ltd.

Background

From 1987 onwards, there was deregulation and an open skies policy within the European Union. This opened up opportunities for additional airlines to enter in to what was at that time a high cost, highly competitive, but restricted European market for air travel.

easyJet ‘Fast Facts’

History and Development

The company was founded by Stelios Haji-Ioannou. easyJet has grown from offering flights between Edinburgh and London Luton and Glasgow and London Luton, to offering 192 routes from 59 European airports. The routes stretch from Inverness in the Highlands of Scotland (north), to Athens in Greece (south), and from Faro in Portugal (west) to Tallinn in Estonia (east). Initially the company used two Boeing 737 aeroplanes. There are now 93 planes in the fleet.

source: www.easyjet.com © easyJet airline company ltd.

easyJet became a Public Limited Company in November 2000.

In 2002 Stelios Haji-Ioannou retired as Chairman and resigned as a Director of the Board, but he and his family continue to hold a majority shareholding. He also controls other easyGroup companies including easyMoney, easyCar.com, and easyValue. easyJet operates independently from the other companies in the group although there are agreed cross-marketing activities where one company will include information about another company’s products and services within their promotional material.

Staff

From September 2004, 3,727 employees were working for the company. This was an increase in just one year of 355 members of staff.

Cabin staff dress in orange coloured tops reflecting the company’s informal corporate style. The company website states that ‘ties are banned except for pilots!’ Office staff are also encouraged to dress casually.

source: www.easyjet.com

Products and Pricing

easyJet is now an established ‘no frills’ airline, preferring to provide economical air travel by cutting out the extra products and services that add to the overall cost of the air fare. Stelios based his operation on a basic service airline operation in the United States known as Value Jet. The website www.easyjet.com states the company philosophy is to keep costs low by:

“Removing the unnecessary costs and ‘frills‘ which characterise ‘traditional’ airlines.”

The Marketing Manager for easyJet North West England explained in her autumn 2004 presentation:

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Place/Distribution

The airline’s headquarters are at Luton Airport to the north of London but the company operates from a number of bases throughout the UK and mainland Europe. EasyJet offers a high frequency of flights on short-haul and medium-haul routes. There are 14 crew bases at Belfast, Berlin Schonefeld, Bristol, Dortmund, Nottingham East Midlands, Edinburgh, Geneva, Glasgow, Liverpool John Lennon, London Luton, London Stansted, London Gatwick, Newcastle and Paris.

In order to keep prices low, easyJet has to keep the company’s costs down. easyJet began operations by only accepting telephone bookings, paid for by credit card. Telephone bookings cut out the need to run a chain of booking offices, helping to minimise operating costs.

In just a few years, sales practices changed considerably. Business growth exploded when the company introduced an internet booking service in the late 1990s. By the spring of 1999 one in three bookings were made over the internet. In October 1999 one million seats had been sold using the internet. The company marked this achievement – and received lots of positive PR - by presenting the one-millionth passenger with free flights for a full year.

By March 2000, less than six months later, the bookings had doubled to two million and three months after that, bookings via the internet had tripled. The internet now provides the most cost-effective distribution channel. The internet is vital to the continued success of easyJet as a low cost organisation.

Customers

“We offer 163 million Europeans the chance to fly from convenient local airports to Europe’s most attractive destinations, saving both time and money”. Source: easyJet Annual Report and Accounts 2004

During the year ended 30 September 2004 easyJet flew 24.3 million passengers.

At first easyJet attracted the younger end of the market. Young people who had good IT skills, were on a fixed budget, and who were less concerned about built-in extras and flying late at night or very early in the morning. It was not long before families, older travellers and business passengers recognised the price advantages of the easyJet product. As computer sales grew and people became more familiar with the internet, the easyJet offer reached an ever-widening audience.

easyJet make the same offer to business customers as to the general public. Businesses can take advantage of the same low price offers available to leisure travellers. Set up in 2003, easyJetB2B is the section of the website www.easyjet.com that is dedicated to business users from the travel trade and corporate community.

Promotion

Slogans

Easyjet has used a number of slogans or strap-lines. ‘The Web’s favourite airline’, stresses the emphasis placed on internet bookings by the company. This slogan was also created because it was similar to the British Airway’s slogan ‘The World’s Favourite Airline’. By producing a similar slogan easyJet was able to reduce the impact of BA’s slogan, as it was no longer unique. At the same time easyJet makes the most of the additional exposure that using such a similar slogan brings, as each time the BA slogan is seen the viewer is likely to be reminded of the easyJet message, and the fact that it is gently poking fun at the BA slogan.

The slogan/strap-line on the main page of the easyJet website in March 2005 was ‘Come On, let’s fly!’ – a direct command and encouragement for potential customers to join in and take action.

Publicity

The LWT ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary series ‘Airline’ shown on ITV is based around the passengers and staff at easyJet. The airline was first approached about the possibility of filming during mid 1998, after a first series with Britannia Airways was discontinued. The first easyJet series was broadcast in January 1999, and the cameras have been with easyJet almost constantly ever since. In 2003 it was ITV’s most popular factual programme with a total of 75 million viewers. The programme has been sold to countries worldwide, including New Zealand, Australia, and Japan.

The programme follows passengers and staff on journeys and during important moments in their lives. Wedding proposals, business trips, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences have all been filmed, both happy and sad. The programme also aims to educate the airline’s passengers concerning its rules and regulations – some of the highlighted issues relate to missed check-in, incorrect travel documentation, and the carriage of prohibited items.

Advertising

Right from the start easyJet took a completely different approach to advertising. Many advertisements are a result of teamwork by the staff, rather than using expensive external agencies.

The Website

The easyJet website is the main method of advertising. It provides details of flights as well as booking facilities. It also provides links to other ‘easy’ companies for car hire, travel insurance etc.

Discounts and Special Offers

easyJet special promotions apply only to the internet. As an incentive, internet bookings receive a discount. Customers are therefore required to book online in order to access the discounted fare.

Valentine’s Day Promotional Campaign

In early 2005, the following encouragement to book a flight to a romantic destination appeared on the easyJet website:

Customers interested in the romantic break only had to click on the orange writing to make their booking.

The ‘product’ detailed in this promotion is no different from the regular easyJet product. It is simply a re-packaging or re-focussing of the existing product. The destinations are the same as are the prices, but the company has ‘placed’ the offer in a different location within the web site and at a specific time of year. This makes the most of the publicity generated by the greetings card and hospitality industries which every year put on big Valentine’s Day advertising campaigns and promotional events.

By adding a specific promotion to an existing web site and using existing customer databases to email the promotion direct to previous customers, easyJet can quickly and economically target a promotion at people who already have a history of buying their products. As bookings are online the company can also identify the impact of the promotion from the level of activity within the lifetime of the promotion (January-February).

Information and Communication Technology

The effective use of ICT has been the secret of easyJet’s success. By keeping prices low and making it easy for the customer to access the product, easyJet has completely transformed the general public’s view of both air travel and, to some extent, the use of the internet.

Registering with easyJet.com allows the customer to check on the status of their own live bookings (and make changes to them if necessary); check their travel history and request a replacement confirmation email any time before the flight, as well as receive regular updates relating to promotions, and launches of new routes and schedules.

The Future