Houston … We have a Problem; The Line Between Good Aviation Marketing and Bad

One of the major reasons small, service and product businesses join trade associations like the National Air Transportation Association (NATA) or the National Business Aircraft Association (NBAA) is to finagle their way in front of potential customers.

For the most part, industry veterans understand that associate members will try to pitch them on goods and services they probably need anyway, so it’s a very synergistic relationship … they pitch and the member company chooses, which is, of course, why companies market … to try and stand out from the crowd.

No one seriously thinks too much about how any of this works or doesn’t until a company crosses that invisible line between creating awareness and becoming a pain in the backside.

One well-known aviation company has not only crossed that line, in my opinion, but regularly taunts customers in the worst way possible … by ignoring them, a singularly bad marketing strategy.  

Although some companies can be irritatingly slow remove people from their marketing database, the best ones offer options at the bottom of an e-mail that says – “If you’d like to removed from this list click here.” That’s because Marketing 101 taught them pushing products or services on people who don’t want them will eventually backfire.

Our company – CommAvia – began receiving unsolicited e-mail marketing from Western Aviation well over a year and a half ago. Since we are not in the market for a used airplane, I clicked on the unsubscribe button, filled out some information and went about my day. A month or two later, my Inbox received a few more and I repeated the unsubscribe process thinking we’d fallen through the cracks. This didn’t slow them down at all. They also garbbed our fax number from somewhere and tried that route for awhile.

Since we’re marketing consultants too, I have zero patience with people who don’t listen when the customer says go away. I called Western Aviation in Houston and spoke to the marketing director who apologized profusely for the mistakes and promised to take care of the problem.

You guessed it, he didn’t and the Spam continued to flow. 

Finally, I simply blocked the e-mail on our servers and Western Aviation’s spam now goes exactly where it should, directly into the Recycle Bin.

I assumed this problem was a fluke, until today when I noticed a number of people on another listserv complaining that they were constantly spammed by an unresponsive Western Aviation too.

What this tells me is that if I ever DID need an airplane, Western Aviation would be the last place I’d call because they’ve again proven a couple of Marketing 101 concepts. First, you only alienate customers when you don’t to listen to them and second, really irritated customer will go out of their way to tell their friends.