Building Loyalty: Can Brand Communities Retain High-Revenue Flyers?

03.05.2024 - 21:37 / forbes.com

Building a brand community sounds like a great idea. According to marketing thought leader Mark Schaefer, community is “the last great marketing strategy.” In Belonging to the Brand, Schaefer calls community “the marketing megatrend of our time.”

These statements might seem to be a bit hyperbolic, but Schaefer points out the declining effectiveness of traditional marketing and advances in technology as drivers of brand communities.

The airline business might pose additional challenges to building community. Most customers are occasional flyers. And, not many people love airlines. It’s hard to love a company that charges extra for amenities that used to be included and stuffs you into a tiny seat on a crowded airplane. And, even the most customer-oriented airlines have problems - flight delays, missing luggage, long waits on tarmacs, and waves of flight cancellations. The airlines get the blame for all of these bad experiences, even those that are caused by circumstances beyond their control.

The data shows the disdain people have for airlines. Not a single airline makes the top 50 in the latest Axios/Harris reputation rankings. Delta does the best at #58, while United and Southwest come in at #70 and #71, respectively. The other big U.S. airline, American, didn’t show up in the top 100. This lack of positive emotional connection is a major hurdle for any kind of community building effort.

FlyerTalk is an online community that calls itself “the largest expert travel community” and claims 850,000+ members. It’s a busy place - while writing this article, I looked in and more than 15,000 members were online.

FlyerTalk is entirely independent from the airline brands, but they do have sub-communities focused on each airline. The United forum alone, for example, has over 40,000 discussions.

A busy digital community hasn’t translated into much offline interaction. While there have been FlyerTalk members who form subgroups to have in-person meetups, these don’t seem common. Attempts to get an Austin, Texas meetup going, for example, have been unsuccessful.

Online communities can still be strong, of course. Across FlyerTalk, many members offer help and advice to others with less experience or who are trying to solve a problem. But, the airline forums can only loosely be considered brand communities. And, they don’t do much, if anything, to promote the brand or increase engagement with the brand.

Other communities, like Reddit’s United Airlines subreddit, seem to feature mostly complaints and anecdotes about passenger or employee behavior.

The one group where a community seems feasible would be an airline’s most frequent flyers. This group has, on average, a better customer experience because of their status.