Airway Global

AirWays Global, a US commercial airline, is experiencing marketing problems 12 years after 9/11. While the industry as a whole is on the path to recovery, after eleven years of uncertainty and decreasing profitability, the airline is still having problems implementing effective customer retention policies. Customer confidence appears to be waning, as indicated by a 20 percent drop in AirWays’s Frequent Flyer Reward Program membership. Preliminary research data indicates that the most profitable “Business Traveler” segment is quickly losing customers. Additionally, industry labor and fuel costs have been rising every year since 2001.

AirWays’s executives are worried that the bad press the company is getting will aggravate labor union representatives and send the wrong signals to Wall Street’s investors. The newly hired chief marketing officer (CMO) admits that marketing is critical to the company’s ability to move forward profitability. Her confidence has been compounded by the recent implementation of a customer relationship management (CRM) system as part of an overall revamping of the company’s marketing information system (MIS). The CMO believes this technology is the centerpiece of AirWays’s future success.