Curtis On…Customer Centricity as a Marketing Strategy: 4. Choosing the Desired Audience Based on Impact
In this fourth of a ten part series of videos, Curtis Bingham, Founder and Executive Director of the Chief Customer Officer Council on location at IQPC's CMO Exchange in London, July 2011, discusses choosing the audience where your offering will have the greatest impact as you embed customer centricity in your organization.
Transcript for Curtis On…Customer Centricity as a Marketing Strategy: 4. Choosing the Desired Audience Based on Impact
We just talked a little bit about the desired audience and segmenting our audience here. There are three key factors in choosing your desired audience for the customer centricity initiatives. Most people start where the greatest impact could be experienced, and this is a good place to start.
JetBlue had lost their way a couple of years ago. They had fallen out of favor with many of the business travelers who used to be their bread and butter. They decided that the most effective use of their resources was in their in-flight experience, the people on the plane and those people who were on the front lines serving those people on the plane.
So, they appointed a vice president of in-flight experience, Vicky Stennes; and I had an opportunity to speak with her at great length a couple of weeks ago; and I'll share with you some of the things that they're doing.
They are focusing so heavily on their flight attendants to get them to describe the behavior, to model the behavior, and to describe exactly how these behaviors need to play out in all kinds of different situations that they've put into place.
And one of the most powerful outcomes that they hadn’t anticipated was that there's a move towards unionization within JetBlue. I spoke with five different attendants (they call them crew members) on a recent JetBlue flight and asked them about it. They said, “We don't need to unionize. We don't need a union. We have better access to our executive leadership now than anywhere else in any other industry.”
And so, by focusing on this group of people, JetBlue has had an unintended side effect here of really crowding out some of the unionization efforts as people are much more satisfied and their employees are so much more engaged.