MKT310- W7 Post and Response

Joseph Smolboski

1. I believe that three different public relation activities that Spirit Airlines most apparently performs are corporate image advertising, public opinion research, and miscellaneous activities in the form of educational efforts. Spirit Airlines utilizes corporate image advertising to differentiate themselves from the competition. One aspect of corporate image advertising is increasing a firm’s name recognition. There is no doubt that Spirit has grown to a massive scale and consumers recognize the brand wen shopping for flights. The company has worked hard to ensure that when their brand is recognized, it is associated with the cheapest fares around. Although there is also a negative connotation when consumers see a Spirit flight, they will always know that that is where they will find the lowest cost. For better or worse, Spirit is very easily recognizable, and their brand image is recognized for exactly what it is. Coming to public opinion research, it was obvious in the podcast that when interviewing Spirit’s CEO, he was very familiar with the market research that ranked his company at the very bottom. Public opinion research is a very powerful tool that allows a company to track where they rank in the industry as well as current consumer opinions about their products or services. Although Spirit was ranked extremely low amongst airlines in the data, the CEO did not seem concerned as he was familiar with the market research and believed it to be flawed. Without the survey including low costs as a factor, the very selling point for Spirit, the results were going to be skewed. along with that, it is easy to not put too much stock in that survey as the stated opinions on that survey do not properly reflect how the consumers will truly act. With full flights, it is obvious that the same consumers that are complaining about the flights are coming back for the low costs. Lastly, the airline is participating in the miscellaneous activity of educational efforts. As the CEO of Spirit mentioned, if a consumer does not know about the lack of amenities on the flight or the upcharges that come with that, it is a sign of a problem on the company’s side. The podcast stated that some of the consumers that were on the Spirit flight were not aware of all of the additional upcharges that kept the initial prices so low. With the CEO stating that he wants this to be readily apparent, an important public relations activity for the company will be educational efforts. If the airline puts more of an emphasis on this aspect of their public relations campaign, consumers will most likely have a more positive image of the airline as they will always know what they are getting themselves into when purchasing those cheap tickets. 

2. Spirit Airlines uses a reactive marketing public relations strategy. a proactive strategy is when a company seeks to form good publicity on their own terms. An example of this could be an executive statement noting the release of a new product that will be featured in the news section of a newspaper. Reactive public relations on the other hand deal with resolving an issue once it has already happened. An example of this is the story noted in the book of The KFC and Taco Bell having rodents running around the establishments. The interview with the CEO made it obvious that the company is not trying to be something it is not or really provide anything besides cheap flights. The company most likely is aware that it would struggle trying to proactively create goodwill in competition with the other large airline brands. Due to this, they take a reactive approach when things do end up going wrong. One example of this happened in 2018 when a college student returning home for break attempted to bring an emotional support hamster on a Spirit flight. Before she arrived, she called to ensure that this would be fine, and a Spirit employee mistakenly informed her that it would be okay. Upon arrival, she was told that she could not bring the rodent onto the flight and had to make a decision. As she saw a lack of options, she reportedly flushed her hamster down a toilet after an alleged suggestion to do so from a Spirit employee and then threatened legal action. In response to this, a spokesperson from Spirit and the public relations team dealt with it in a few different ways. The spokesperson stated that it was unfortunate that the initial phone call mislead her to believe that she could bring the hamster but there is no way that any of their employees directed her to flush the hamster down the toilet. He added that it is unfortunate that she decided to end her own pet’s life in this way, even after the company offered her a later flight free of charge as well as a flight voucher later. This is an example of reactive public relations as Spirit had to come out and make a statement to correct a situation that was shining a negative light on them. 

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Chp. 21