Assessment Part B & C
Product / Service: Airline - Cathay Pacific Airways Limited
Topic (Group (or External) Influence: CLASS & VALS Grouping
With a product, or in this case, service such as an airline, class becomes a very sensitive and curious aspect to analyse and look into. Specifically with Cathay Pacific Airways being a relatively high-end market oriented airline, class tends to be more highlighted. We can safely presume that with ads such as the ones given below, that the airline is speaking to the upper market and upper middle class; needless to say, the more elite members of society. Let’s take into good consideration aspects like Education, Income, Society and Occupation from Weber and Marx. The quality and level of education an individual obtains highly affects his preference when consuming such services. One who is highly and well educated tends to spend more time learning about the product or service before making an actual call to purchase. And not only this, airline services are perceived to be more of a high-involvement product. So with those two given characteristics of the market and the service respectively, it can only mean that the service should market itself effectively by positioning itself significantly apart from the rest competing airlines. Income and society sometimes may be perceived as a hand and hand area of describing a person’s status. Basically, the more income you earn, the more ego you build, thus the more power you impose on yourself and more importantly, the more power and social leverage you get from the eyes of the society. Sometimes, they may not even know how much you earn but because you establish a sense of personal status when consuming a service that is known to be of the higher class and more expensive, you create a social image of power and a high social status.
Class as a reference group is described in terms of what members (or the particular market) value and do. With this brand, the target audience...