Marketing Concept - Mkt 571

Marketing is crucial to the success of any organizations. Having the right strategy and planning in place helps guide to accomplish the target goals. In the case of Classis Airline, it is in the mist of facing declining business. It is losing both loyal customers in frequent fliers and failing to attract new customers. It is also facing rising energy cost that is cutting into Classis Airline’s bottom line and hurting the company’s stock price. As a result, Classic Airline’s Board of Directors set a new high goal to reduce cost across the board in an attempt turn the company around while expects to improve the frequent flier program.

Classic Airline faces many challenges as energy cost rises while many corporations are cutting back in business travels due to economic reason. To stay competitive, similar to many other airlines, Classic offers frequent flier program to build loyal base customers. Study of customer feedbacks about Classic’s frequent flier program shows many limitations. To offer flexibility to frequent fliers, other airlines started the alliance program where several airlines integrate their reward program to offer convenience to their customers. This is known as the relationship-marketing concept as according to Kotler & Keller (2006) “Relationship marketing has the aim of building mutually satisfying long-term relationships with key parties—customers, suppliers, distributors, and other marketing partners—in order to earn and retain their business. Relationship marketing builds strong economic, technical, and social ties among the parties.” Classic is currently not offering such program as it is against the belief of CEO Amanda Miller. Chief Marketing officer Kevin Boyle believes this concept can help retain and attract more frequent fliers, as it is already a proven concept implemented at Skyway Airlines by Kevin’s ex-partner, Josef Wyman.

Classic Airline also has a fundamental flaw in its philosophy on how to utilize the CRM...