Marketing Mix Paper
Introduction
The airline industry has been facing numerous challenges over the years, even before the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. High fuels costs, staffing costs, logistics costs, over-crowded airports, and other issues have impacted air travel. In most recent years, the airline industry has reformed and repositioned itself on marketing to the consumer. Prior to the airline challenges years ago, air travel had high demand and therefore had a diminutive need to attract consumers through marketing efforts. Nowadays, the airline industry is extremely competitive and has become essential to modernize marketing plans to target consumers in order to persuade them to fly and fly with their company. Utilizing the four P’s of Marketing which are price, place, promotion and product, the airline industry is trying to reclaim consumer confidence as well as present and future business.
Challenges of the Industry
The challenges of the airlines over the years have been encompassing. Many firms are filing bankruptcy, reorganizing the business and other methods in order to stay afloat. In this quest for survival, many firms test the regulations which have resulted in court cases. One specific incident was between the US Government and American Airlines. The US Government filed suit because they claimed “American Airlines was using a practice called predatory pricing to lure customers to them as an exclusive airline choice. It was the first action like it in several decades and was a wake-up call to the industry to start using marketing techniques to gather customers, as the government was no longer going to allow limit testing techniques.” (Lawsky, 1999). In rebuttal to this, many airline firms started to refocus on their marketing techniques. Firms started to create programs and marketing campaigns to lure consumers to use its services even with relatively similar pricing to its competitors.
Four Ps of Marketing
Airline firms...