Virgin Atlantic’s Critical Analysis
Jack Cowdrey
Virgin Atlantic was founded in 1984 to be a high quality and good value for money airline. While this was a difficult environment for Virgin Atlantic to develop, they still became the first to offer individual TV for business class.
Virgin Atlantics Websites Role
Virgin Atlantic websites main key role as a service orientated function to it. Customers come onto their website to find prices and times for flights to their desired destination. They do this by offering a range of services such as Economy Class, Business Class or First Class. They go further than this by offering their customers Flights + Hotels, Hotels and just car rental. However, their website can be used as relationship building as they create blogs for users. They have done this as a type of Brand Building as they want to use the blogs to help their customers.
Virgin Atlantics Competitors
Virgin Atlantic’s main competitors would be Emirates and British Airways. These two would be their closely matched competitors as they all offer a high quality of service. When benchmarking the companies together it is clear what the key differences are between these companies. While all these companies are service orientated, they are very different in their own way. Virgin Atlantic is the only one out of the chosen competitors which offers its customers a Virgin Atlantic Blog. They have subcategorized their blogs under; our aircraft, our places, our people, our style and our future. This helps build relationships between the customer and the business as it allows customers to get insight into the world the Virgin Atlantic. While British Airways and Emirates both have exceptional websites, they have don’t have their own blog page.
Targeting and Segmentation
The type of customers which Virgin Atlantic target are those who describe themselves as ‘Mavericks, Adventurous and pioneering’ these are referred to by Virgin Atlantic as ‘Fearless Leaders’ (Inc, 2013). Virgin Atlantic have used their skills to appeal to these types of customers by introducing onboard bars, nail salons and get a massage. Virgin Atlantic also ran a campaign with the hashtag as; #FITFOO, this was labelled as ‘Flying in the Face of Ordinary’. This campaign needed its customers to boast about how good it is using Virgin Atlantic. The idea of this campaign was to make other airline passengers jealous of the experience that their customers were receiving from Virgin Atlantic. Virgin Atlantic has been known to target customers who tend to be business travellers (MarketingWeek, 2015). 
Customer Personas
After looking at Virgin Atlantics segmentation it is clear to see that they are targeting people from predominantly from the middle class or upper class. This is proven as most of their packages have been luxurious services such as booking a chauffeur to help transport you from your house to the airport and then from the airport to your desired destination i.e. hotel or villa. Virgin Atlantic are actively looking for ‘passionate’ experience seekers and those with ‘can-do attitude’ (MarketingWeek, 2015).
Customer Journey
Looking at the Appendix / you can see the different points at which the key personas had a change of mind. One key point to look at would be when Trevor compares the prices to the competitors. This could be down to Trevor’s job being less well paid as Sarah, so this means that he will have to check other airlines prices as he is more price sensitive. You can also see on the post-engagement that Trevor has read the airlines promotional material, this again could be to ensure that he finds the best deal possible available to him.
References:
Inc.com. (2018). How Virgin Atlantic’s Marketing Nails It. [online] Available at: https://www.inc.com/janine-popick/how-virgin-atlantics-marketing-nails-it.html [Accessed 13 Dec. 2018].
Marketing Week. (2018). Virgin Atlantic targets ‘passionate’ experience seekers with new brand ad – Marketing Week. [online] Available at: https://www.marketingweek.com/2015/01/05/virgin-atlantic-targets-passionate-experience-seekers-with-new-brand-ad/ [Accessed 13 Dec. 2018].
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