It may sound trite, but managers really
do compromise or expunge their company’s reputational capital altogether in
order to chase down the additional revenue obtainable from a market segment
that had been extraneous to the reputation. If the new advertisements have a
Janus-like duplicitousness air, the source is not likely even to admit to the
previously long-held principles. Indeed, the contrivance can be discerned from
the way in which artful managers use words themselves—stretching them for an
intended effect well past their respective meanings and customary usages.
Unfortunately, the made-up diction can be contagious in a society that esteems
organizational position.
I have in mind Jet Blue’s switch from
its egalitarian single-class cabins to the first/coach bifurcated model. Left
in the jet-wash is the company’s long-standing principle of egalitarianism,
lost in the anticipation of more revenue from business travelers. Jami Counter
at a website that includes reviews of airlines suggests that Jet Blue would no
longer be “challenged winning their fair share of corporate and business
contracts because they didn’t have a true premium experience.”[1] What, pray tell, is
a premium experience? How does a true one differ
from the mere garden-variety? In the case of JetBlue, the benefits to the
business traveler include “the longest, widest flatbed seats” on any route
within the U.S., and four “suites”—single-seat “pods” with their own doors.[2] The latter reminds
me of the forts my elementary school friends and I used to make in the woods
behind the school; each of us would pick a bush and use its base to build a
tiny enclosed “fort.” It would seem that adult business travelers have the same
instinct.
In any case, we don’t have to look far
to see where verbal garbage like “a true premium experience” comes from.
Perhaps the experience-warping complimentary “signature drink” before take-off
and a “cocktail” before dinner might render experience itself transparent, such
that the airline could indeed market “experience” itself. All the same, I would
be more interested in the 100 channels on the seat’s 15-inch screen, and
whether I could plug my laptop into it as I sit in my little fort as the elongated
tin can careens forward at 30,000 feet at 500 miles an hour.
Jamie Perry, the airline’s director of product development,
delivered a line as if on cue that the novelty would not be limited to the
“Mint,” or first-class” experience; an “effort to reinvent the core
cabin”[3]—where “core” is a cover
for coach—boils down to bigger seats, power-outlets at each one,
and up to 100 channels of television undoubtedly to placate perturbed
pre-existing customers accustomed to flying egalitarian. Perry's linguistic
over-reach—the larger seats and additional plugs hardly constituting an
invention in any sense of the word (and reinvention being an oxymoron, like rebeginning)—points to a certain
round-aboutness that is anything but up-front and transparent.
Behind the "reinvented cabin" is a manufactured shift
from the longstanding egalitarian premise to that of all boats rising—just not
to the same level. The lack of equivalence is precisely what the fuzzy
word-play is meant to blur. That is to say, the crafty wordplay—“core” for
coach and “premium experience” for first-class service—dovetails with the wily
switch from the long-held principle to one that allows for broader revenue
streams.
I disagree with Counter’s contention that JetBlue did not change
its business model in the process; in fact, I would say that the
first-class/coach standard fare deprives the airline of the more distinctive
model, and thus of the associated reputational capital. To be sure, Counter
does acknowledge that the change “could alienate the loyal JetBlue flier who
now has to walk past (five) rows of a very premium experience.”[4] There we go again! How exactly does a
person walk past an experience? Does a person say, “Hey, guess what—yesterday I
was out doing errands and I drove right past an experience!” The response is
likely to be, “Time for your medication again, dear.”
In actuality, the coach passengers are to walk past rows of more
spacious seating arrangements and larger television screens. Putting the matter
thusly, rather than artfully and without concrete substance, makes the cost to
the airline’s reputational capital transparent—especially with respect to the
loyal (i.e., long-standing) passengers who will of course instantly notice the unpalatable
change. Such passengers need only look over at Southwest Airline, whose
approach to attracting more business passengers was to expand to big-city
airports and offer “business select” priority boarding, a free drink, and extra
frequent-flier miles rather than introducing a separate class of seating.[5] That is to say, Jetblue
managers could have went with alternatives to the old first-class/coach model.
The principles that a company supposedly “stands for” are indeed expendable,
particularly when they grind up against an untapped source of revenue.
1. Charisse
Jones, “Egalitarian JetBlue Tries Out First Class,” USA Today, June
12, 2014.
