You know it's rarely a good sign when people get creative with your company brand :-)
I'm on a Delta flight, leaving an hour and a half late (fortunately not as late as other Delta flights here), and when I put a comment on my Facebook wall about "what's up with the Delta delays?" a guy that I worked with during my road warrior work days commented with...
Don't you know Delta stands for Doesn't Ever Leave The Airport?
And then another friend commented with...
Don't Expect Luggage To Arrive.
For someone who has endured long delays and has had my luggage lost... not once, not twice, but at least three times by this airline, I had to laugh. Why? Because I've experienced this... it's pretty true.
Being a marketing professional by training and trade, this intrigues me a lot, because you know that Delta isn't really trying to get this type of publicity and their PR department isn't exactly pumping out this message. However, Delta does (if you see the billboards and other marketing they put out) spend millions of dollars every year to attempt to brand themselves as an airline that can take you everywhere and anywhere, where they still care about customer service, and that they have a personality (or at least that redhead that talks like William Shatner and waves her finger at you when she says that smoking is "not allowed" does). However, all of those ad dollars and all of those branding efforts, you have to imagine, get wasted when you book a Delta flight to "go somewhere" and it's stuck on the tarmac for 2 hours, or is delayed by over an hour and a half, or when you arrive at this exotic destination you find out that your luggage is in an entirely other part of the world.
What speaks louder? The advertising messages... the PR statements... the cool new colors on the airplane?
Or the fact that they lost my luggage... again?
I think you know :-)
And back to Delta, and the fact that they can get me anywhere... 2 hours late. Maybe with my luggage. They do provide a good service, but at the end of the day these consumer experience issues do become part of a company's brand, whether they like it or not. It's not just for airlines.
At the end of the day, your Marketing department doesn't ultimately determine your brand; they can only attempt to define it in the customer's perception and drive awareness. Your customers ultimately define the brand. And for those brands that meet or exceed expectations, this is a wonderful thing. For those that do not, it keeps Brand Managers busy, but can make a company look a little silly.
As the acronyms and parodies can tell you. Ha!
