PR Company, Internet Marketing

Airmiles Commits PR Suicide

It has been a tough couple of weeks for The Mileage Company – the people who manage Airmiles. Since the announcement that Airmiles would be ‘making some changes’ to its offering, there has been an outpouring of anger from the public about it, with disgruntled customers taking to TV, radio and of course, the internet to publicise this issue.

For a bit of background information for those who may not already be aware of what has happened, Airmiles is changing its name to Avios, and under this new brand name, Airmiles as we know it will cease to exist. Points already saved by customers for free flights will be devalued and from 16 November 2011, customers will have to pay for the fees, taxes and charges of flights they want to use their points for. The Guardian newspaper gave this example of how big an impact the changes will have on customers.

If an Airmiles customer decided to go on the cheapest available flight from London to New York in November (c. £400), the current Airmiles offering would mean a customer would have to use 5000 points to get a free return flight. Under Avios, slightly fewer points would be required but the charges and taxes would mean the customer would have to pay £301. So you can see why customers who have gone out of their way to collect points would be angry.

Amazingly, Airmiles admit that they know this charge is ‘unwelcome’, however they says that they cannot continue to subsidise the taxes and fees that have risen over 100% in the last few years.

Be that as it may, customers are angry that they feel they have not been given a long enough grace period to use the points they have worked so hard to save. The media is full of stories of people who have gone out of their way to shop at retailers who offer Airmiles points, use credit cards that help them collect points etc. It turns out that there were a lot of customers were deeply loyal to the Airmiles brand who will now lose out due to the changes.

It begs the question, what on earth were Airmiles thinking when they decided to change their product AND their brand. If their objective was to make points more desirable and valuable then they have failed and destroyed the value of their brand with one press release. By rebranding, customers will already become suspicious of the changes – it was essentially a big waste of money in our opinion. Airmiles had brand equity and the loyalty of thousands of customers, if changes had to be made then they could have been made gradually under the Airmiles brand, that way, their PR agency wouldn’t currently be working overtime trying to limit the irrevocable damage to their brand.

Within the marketing industry, many are confused as to why Airmiles are adopting a name that doesn’t appear to mean anything and isn’t even unique. www.avios.org.uk is the website that belongs to the Association of Visually Impaired Office Staff. As an internet marketing agency, if a client of ours was considering a brand overhaul, we would always advise choosing a brand name that is truly unique so you can own all of the sensible web domain suffixes such as .co.uk, .com, .org etc. This would mean that nobody else can ‘cybersquat’ in the future and potentially steal your web traffic whether intentionally or not. It took Twitter a long time to purchase www.twitter.co.uk, until recently, if you typed this in then you got the home page of an English person bemoaning how many people came to his website by accident and that Twitter wouldn’t buy his domain.

There is then the terrible way that Airmiles is handling their social media. Airmiles have an opportunity to appease customers but the cold and unhelpful manner in which they have so far been responding to customers on their Facebook page has been a new lesson to ‘how not to use social media’.

Responses such as “A change such as this takes time and consideration. We feel we have given our customers sufficient notice in reference to these changes. Thanks. Emily.”

We feel this response is extremely corporate and was the online equivalent of one folding one’s arms and blowing a raspberry.

This is not a satisfactory or engaging response. Whilst we appreciate timely responses are required in social media, the public relations department of Airmiles should have been fully prepared for the storm that would have surrounded the announcement. We would have expected the PR to work with the legal team to give real, informative and correct responses to aggrieved customers. Customers who are unsure how they can use their loyalty points need real answers, not a kick in the teeth answer.

Ultimately, Airmiles have made more than a faux pas with their handling of the changes they are implementing. Not only is their new brand bordering on ridiculous and meaningless, their product has been poorly communicated with changes to take effect in a very short period of time. The mistake Airmiles have made is that they have underestimated the loyalty people have to the brand they spent more than 20 years building up. They could have appeased their customers by freezing the current reward programme for those who already have accrued a significant number of points, worked with their retail partners to ensure that those who had exchanged Tesco Clubcard points for Airmiles could convert them back if they couldn’t use them in time. Loyalty programmes are in place to reward loyalty and unfortunately, all Airmiles have achieved is showing customers that their loyalty actually means very little and the ‘flexibility’ they will be offering in the future has come at a terribly high price.

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