Virgin America

The Experience:

What I remember was walking into a pimped up, purple lit plane. It certainly didn’t do anything ‘practical’ like shorten the flight time, or make the seats more comfortable. It did one thing very important though, it delivered over and beyond what I’ve come to expect from airlines- long, boring flights during which I would have to force myself to sleep to while the time away. Virgin America (VA) made sure the basic necessities weremet – comfy seats, cordial stewardesses and cups of fizzy drinks. What I think they did right was that VA gave me something to talk about to and with my friends.

It was love at first sight.

After I got through the initial excitement about the blinged up plane interior (and it was really just simple change of light hue), VA proceeded to retain my interest by showing me this in flight safety video:

A really awesome alternative to stuffy air stewardesses doing live demonstrations that nobody watches, or boring videos that look like they were filmed in the 1980s (in most cases, they probably WERE). Swanky stuff!

The fun stuff doesn’t stop there.

We were engaged in the seat to seat chat, a flirty (and inherently social) idea that would have worked if MORE people were on it, as with all social applications.

This picture is here solely as proof of fact that I OWN AT ANAGRAMS. Well, at least once out of many tries!

Co branding helps too! Why stick to old boring and flat rendered maps when you can tie up with one of the largest (and coolest) brands on the earth right now- Google! I am sorry about the Oogling. It was purely unintentional, but they’re so huge I’m sure you recognize their logo anyway!

There’s a lot of things going on for Virgin in all this, obviously, they do airlines much better than their sodas. Virgin Cola was a pretty bottle full of drinkable detergent. I bought each one just for a different coloured bottle. Then I stopped because the drinks tasted really bad and they were turning my tongue blue/orange/green, you get the picture.

As you can see, a pretty exterior will not distract the customer from a really bad product. At the end of the day, the fact that your product must rock is taken for granted. What you need to do is to deliver over what people have come to expect of the experience from you, or even better, as compared to your competitors.

More to come on this next!

Tags: branding, virgin, airlines, google, anagrams, experience, Virgin America, flying, inflight entertainment, co branding,