My loyalty to and likelihood of evangelizing for a given organization is directly proportional to the quality of the experience inherent in basic interactions with them. Stuff like waiting on the phone. Seth Godin says “your brand is your return policy.” In that your brand is what people think of you, I agree.
Westjet must agree too.
I’ve never met their executives, engineers, mechanics or pilots. I don’t recall their marketing materials. And in economy, planes are planes, the seats are cramped and the the food isn’t. I’ve only really ever interacted with one of their customer touchpoints–their flight attendants. But the experience has been so consistently memorable that I now realize it’s a business strategy. Someone clued in to the fact that air-travel is imperfect, and the only influence they had over the experience was attitude. Theirs is swell.
And they look twice as good because Air Canada sucks. With enemies like AC, who needs friends?
I bet they’d be happy to know how my family and I feel about traveling with them. I bet they’d be happier to hear how many people I’ve told and how many of them agreed with me about the Westjet expereince. And I bet they’d never admit it, but I’m sure that deep down they’d be happy to hear how many of the people I’ve discussed this with agreed with me about the Air Canada experience.
