Corporate Advertising Program Would You

¶ … Corporate Advertising Program would you recommend for Jet Blue?

The unfortunate events JetBlue experienced Valentine's Day 2007 are today still reverberating in many of airline passenger rights advocates' memories, serving to motivate them to push for legislative rights for the air traveler (Holland, 2008). Advertising designed to overcome the worst commercial jet experience that passengers have had in the last decade needs to go beyond the traditional limits of service recovery strategies and the promise of greater compensation, even if it does mean free air travel (Waite, 2007). The offer the CEO of JetBlue makes is not enough, because it does not solve the most fundamental problem, which is why no one will want to fly this airline anymore. Merely making a commitment to a Customer Bill of Rights also does not guarantee performance improvement as many will see it as another attempt to sweep the entire issue away under a mea culpa to the press (Holland, 2008). While the concepts of service recovery are biblically-based regarding their equitable approach to outcomes, they aren't really changing the culture of JetBlue for the better, which is what needs to happen.

Recommendations for Corporate Advertising Program

The culture of JetBlue is flawed; this can be seen from allowing passengers to sit up to nine hours on a jet and no one taking the initiative to get a bus to unload them. This also speaks to the lack of ownership in even the smallest tasks within the airline. The attitude it is always "someone else's job" must permeate JetBlue to allow a jet to sit on the tarmac for nine hours and no one to feel empathy. The corporate advertising program therefore needs to strike at the heart of what went wrong that day, and not just try to cover it up with promises of better service. Let's face it, no one who sat on those jets for nine hours will believe what JetBlue says anyway. What the Corporate Advertising Program needs to do is show how hard JetBlue is trying to change from the inside. As the Bible says, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks," which means that you will know a person's thoughts and what they hold dear by how they speak. This is a critical lesson for JetBlue management. They cannot just gloss over this with the promise of better performance because that will immediately make them even less credible. The fact that no one stood up for the customers in the first place is an excellent case in point as to how flawed the culture is (McGregor, 2007). The Corporate Advertising program needs to instead concentrate on cultural change. It needs to show how JetBlue is rewarding employees for taking initiative, and explain how employees who go beyond get recognized -- and those that ignore customers are gone. JetBlue needs to embrace the Golden Rule and use that as the basis of their advertising, taking the high road instead of just focusing on making promises no one believes anyway (Kochan, 2006).