And what about you ?

Through this blog, we want to share with you some insight about the airline industry but mostly about brand strategies of the most powerful companies. Our articles were focused on understanding how the companies try to develop their brand through their values, event sponsorship, communications, celebrity endorsement…

But this time, we wanted to have your opinion to see if you really see these brands how we present them to you in this blog. To do that, we conducted some interviews of travellers to test the image, awareness and perception of some famous brands. We conducted 10 interviews with students. These students represent large amounts of the travellers and are also the future 1^st or business class customers of airline companies. The population is composed of Chinese and French students in order to be able to compare the vision of people from different nationalities.

We will share the results of these interviews with you today.

Among the students we interviewed, 40% are frequent travelers as they travel between 4 and 6 times a year by plane. Then, they are the good population to judge the image and awareness of airlines as they are used to travel very often and with several companies.

The first question was an open question in order to students to list the 3 premium airlines that come to their mind. This question helps us to determine the unaided awareness of the airline brands. The results were pretty similar and the 3 most named brands were Air France, Emirates and Singapore Airlines.

More deeply, Air France has been cited by 7 people and 6 times in first position. This is a very high score of unaided awareness for Air France and means that for our population, it is one of the most known premium airlines. Of course it can be explained by the fact that our population is mostly composed of French students.

In second position, we have Emirates, which has been cited by 5 people and twice in first position.

And finally we have Singapore Airlines named 3 times.

Then, we wanted to know more about the companies who decided to focus on low cost. We asked the students to named the first low cost airline that come to their mind. No surprise for us, Easyjet was the winner with 7 votes followed by RyanAir with 2 votes. These low cost airlines are the most known in Europe so these results are understandable.

After discovering the most known airline companies, we wanted to understand what they really think of these companies.

You can see below the 3 most frequent words attributed to each brand:

These attributes represent quite well what people think of these brands even if it is not especially what the brand want to be associated with.

It seems that Emirates has a very good and luxurious image for students. This image is the one the company tries to develop so it is very good.

Singapore may be less known by the students interviewed.

Finally, we wanted to go deeper by asking people to associate some attributes to famous airline companies.

Here are the results of the main cited brands for each adjective given.

Classy	Emirates (5 times)
Trendy	Emirates (4 times)
Reliable	Air France (5 times)
Friendly	Air France and Emirates (twice for each)
Innovative	Mixed, premium (Emirates, Qatar, Virgin) as well as low cost (Easyjet, Southwest Airlines)
Unpleasant	Easyjet and RyanAir

These results confirm the results from the previous question regarding the image these students have of the most famous airline companies.

•    Emirates is well known and seen as luxurious, classy and trendy
•   Air France is also well known but even if it is seen as offering quality service, they suffer from a bad image because of their numerous strikes
• Singapore Airlines is not well known among our students who think it is Asia related
• Easyjet is well known among the low cost airlines but have a very bad image of being unpleasant