I would like to run out into the streets brandishing pom-poms and leap into the air screaming “Go Aeromil!”. However, modesty and a middle-aged hammy keep my pom-poms in the cupboard.
What’s got me all fired-up is the brilliant idea Cessna distributor Aeromil Pacific had to take GA to Martin Place in Sydney. Right in the middle of the frenetic pace of the CBD peak hour they plonked a mock runway and a Cessna 172. Even if only to make them walk around it, that aeroplane had an impact on the day of thousands of city denizens who, on any other day, wouldn’t even see wings let alone walk under them.
The incongruity of a Cessna in the city has not been seen since Mathias Rust thought, “hmmm … I might go to Moscow”, so you can bet it would have drawn its fair share of curious admirers, which is exactly what it was supposed to do.
It’s a concept called “marketing”. Don’t bother looking it up in the glossary of the VFG, you won’t find it there. It means to take a great product and show the people how much they want it, and all the best commercial operations embrace it, even CASA and Australian Flying. Marketing takes many forms and is hard to escape from, but it is essential to any business looking to get their share of consumers’ spare money.
So why is it largely absent from General Aviation?
Because we are flyers, we fly aeroplanes, and don’t think too much about getting customers into the top end of the funnel.
No, this has nothing to do with the oil level in your Lycoming. It’s a well-proven sales concept (and we are talking about selling) whereby all the prospective customers are fed into the top of a theoretical funnel, and through filtering the prospects get less and less as we qualify how serious they are. In the end, only a fraction (about 2-5 per cent) comes out the bottom of the funnel as serious sales. So if you have 100 potential customers, only about 2-5 will actually give you any money. There are days when the process becomes a dry argument: nothing comes out of the funnel at all.
Yes, it’s an exhaustive process that in the end yields a lot less than your effort probably deserves. But that doesn’t mean you can stop. Nothing in the top of the funnel means nothing out of the bottom either. And it is marketing that keeps prospects flowing into the top.
No marketing means no prospects, and that’s where GA is at. Okay, you hear the occasional advert for a flying school on the radio, usually squirreled away in non-prime hours to lower the cost, or you will see a too-modest single-column advert in a local newspaper. Admirable efforts and better than nothing, but you can’t whisper good news, you have to shout it. GA in Perth has taken it to the streets in the past with fly-ins at the old Langley Park aerodrome. Kudos to you, WA, that’s what I call shouting good news! It is a pity that other capitals don’t have the luxury of a useable lump of land right in commuters’ faces.
Very welcome to me was the rescue plan released by the seven aviation associations (I can’t keep writing that, from here on in they are the “A7”). The output hits things right on the head, but only extreme optimists would think that producing this paper is all that’s needed to save GA; in reality it is a statement of woes, with possible solutions. However, along the way the A7 woke up that GA is not being marketed properly as a whole.
Piecemeal approaches to marketing usually fail, because they don’t carry the momentum of larger campaigns. It’s sort of like committing troops to the battle one platoon at a time rather than sending in the whole company. Whilst they are not totally responsible for resurrecting GA, the A7 can be a focal point for co-ordinating a total marketing effort for our industry. We’ve never had that before, and a real opportunity is now before us, if we recognise it as such.
Good, focused marketing will start prospects flowing into the top of the funnel in much greater numbers, which translates to more people spending money on flying. The only way to do that is to show them that they really do want to fly. To do that, you have to get in their faces; that’s what marketing is.
Avalon is coming up in March. Do we think there is an opportunity hidden there somewhere?
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch
SEE MORE PHOTOS FROM AEROMIL PACIFIC'S CESSNA IN THE CITY PROMOTIONAL DISPLAY BELOW...