Build From Zero / Issue 01
Marketing and growth, for anyone building a business and a brand.
Sometime in 2021, I was in a room with four or five other people. And we were trying to build an airline.
Not a campaign for an airline. The airline itself.
It had no name at this point. No logo, no colours, no aircraft, no agency and no team. All I had was a blank piece of paper and thousands of decisions to make.
One of the most fundamental ones was, how do we position this airline?
Everyone knows the text book answer. Find the gap in the market. Look for the white space nobody is occupying. Talk to customers about what the existing airlines get wrong. Transfer equity from a brand that already works somewhere else.
Every one of those answers is correct as a method. Yet, every one of them was useless to me, because in Indian aviation in 2021 there was no real fillable gap to find or fill.
Positioning is step 1 for any business and that is where I wanted to start. You may not be starting an airline but as a founder you also might be looking for a gap that doesn't exist. And that is costing you time you don't have.
If you want to understand aviation, start with these two numbers.
RASK is revenue per available seat kilometre. CASK is cost per available seat kilometre. Basically, how much one seat earns you, and how much one seat costs you. The gap between them is the whole business.
If cost is higher than revenue, the airline bleeds. If revenue is higher than cost, you fly. Southwest, Delta, Emirates, Singapore and Indigo. All of them have done it. Both are calculated at per seat level, not at a company level because for an airline, a seat is the perfect sales unit.
And then there are thousands and thousands of decisions you make which come together to determine your RASK and CASK.
Take a USB port in the seat back. Ask any flyer and they would say yes. We want it. Even buses have it nowadays. Except the decision is not about the port. The decision is about the wiring that runs from the power unit to every single seat. Wiring which costs money and adds weight. Extra weight that burns more fuel on every single flight for the next fifteen or twenty years.
In aviation, you don't pay for every decision once. You pay for it forever.
Same with paint. Some colours cost more than others. Like those super-fine metallic paints with a pearly finish? They cost more. Custom colours cost more. That's why some airlines skip painting the underside of the aircraft entirely and leave it bare metal, because paint is weight and weight is fuel.
So when people ask why the largest airline in India does not just give you a thicker seat: they want to. They cannot. The seat is not just a brand or customer experience decision. In its simplest form, you are deciding if a customer will pay the X amount more for a better cushion for their bottom and if that X is higher than your forever-cost for adding that extra thickness.
Most industries have a problem like this one. A physical, regulatory or contractual constraint that leaves little wiggle room. Insurance has IRDA, telecom has TRAI, banking has RBI. All good and necessary, but creates a boundary inside which you have to operate.
Here is what the market actually looked like when we were building.
There were low-cost carriers and there were full-service carriers. Around the world, there is a real distinction between the two but not in India. Fly an ultra-low-cost airline in Europe and they will stop you at the gate if your bag does not fit through the metal frame. They will sell you a small bottle of water for real money. In London you have Heathrow and you have Gatwick, and Gatwick charges the airline less, which is part of how the low-cost model works at all.
In India you are required to give the passenger water. You are required to include some baggage. There is no cheap secondary airport to fly into. Same aircraft types, same pilots, same training costs, same fuel, same airport charges, same everything.
Which means, the honest difference between a low-cost carrier and a full-service carrier in the domestic Indian market comes down to just two things that a customer sees: free meals and loyalty points.
The irony being that even the full-service carriers were unable to charge a premium. Go to any booking site and you will find a full-service airline pricing themselves at par with a low-cost airline for the same sector, at the same price. The "full-service" experience could not be converted into a premium pricing. Jet could not. Vistara could not, neither could Air India. They all had to compete on price.
So: no product difference, no price premium available, no regulatory room to create one.
That is not an unusual market. That is most markets. A founder's instinct is to keep hunting for the delta but sometimes there is no real difference.
Positioning, as it is usually taught, is about difference. Find the space no one occupies and own it.
14 years in marketing have taught me something else. Real differentiation is often just doing the same thing, better than everyone else, and making sure people can see it.
That sounds too basic. It is. Yet so difficult to implement.
Better only works as a position when you have had each individual customer experience it in some way.
"We are better" is not a position.
"You can fly with your dog" is a position. A truth for a person with a dog.
"We won't punish you if your bag is 500g over the limit" is a position. A truth for a person who was stopped at the counter.
It sounds like a lot of work but winning niche segments, one policy, one process, one staff training, one good customer experience at a time, eventually creates that positioning for you in the market. That no marketing campaign can.
Test it on yourself. Cover the logo on your homepage and your competitor's. Could a customer tell which is which? If not, you do not have a positioning problem in the strategic sense. You have a distinctiveness problem, and it is cheaper to fix.
The brand or the positioning cannot come before or at the cost of profitability or unit economics.
Profitability gives you the right to have a positioning.
Which means: you cannot be generous until you are profitable. You can promise hospitality, warm faces, someone picking up your bag. If there is no money coming in, none of that survives. One bad quarter and that is the first thing to get cut as frivolous expenses.
For a founder this is the boring, unglamorous half of positioning. A position you cannot afford to keep is not a position. It is just a campaign.
Marketing and growth, for anyone building a business and a brand.
So we could not be different. We decided what we would be better at, and then we installed it everywhere.
The uniform. A standard aviation uniform is built around how it looks on a runway. Heels, formal shoes, western cut, for people who are on their feet for twelve hours. The team decided to go unisex, and spent a disproportionate amount of attention on the shoes, because the shoes are what the crew actually feel. Recycled materials, no plastic in the soles. Designed around the crew, not the runway.
It got resistance. When the idea was first presented, some important people felt our staff would look like a bunch of college kids. But the leadership team stayed true to their beliefs and the results are out for everyone to see. (A shout out to Aditya, Belson and Kiara for their vision)
The pet policy. One of very few airlines in this part of the world that lets you fly with your pet. The number of pet parents who fly with their pets must be tiny. But they fly plenty of times on their own. And they are sure to tell others about their experience. The positive impact on the brand is far beyond the ticket sales for pet seats. (this happened much after I left)
The on-board meals. Different enough that people spoke about it. People simply didn't expect croissants and gourmet salads from an LCC. People were ok to pay as long as they got good, healthy meals in return. Not the same old cold sandwiches.
The packaging. Brown. Unbranded-looking, minimal ink, top-grade biodegradable. When we presented it internally the pushback was immediate. Why does this look like a parcel? Every other airline's packaging is bright and shiny. That was the point. The package looked different because it was different and people noticed.
Not one of those can stand on its own. But together, they create the feeling of an airline that goes the distance.
Aviation is a category where some people fly very often and others only fly 2-3 times a year. You cannot mass-advertise your way into a purchase for the second larger audience pool. You cannot build preference in someone's head today for a booking they will make in three months. What you can do though is win a series of small groups completely (pet owners, people who care what the packaging is made of, people who want to try something new, people who can trust an airline with their parents, people who appreciate kind, warm service) and let them do the talking. But you put all of them together, and you have created a community that slowly starts falling in love with you.
Strip away everything else and I would tell a founder a brand does three jobs:
All three are slow. None of them arrive from a campaign.
Building a brand is about building trust. Yet you cannot decide to be the most trusted brand and get there, and you certainly cannot buy it. You can only choose the things that produce it and then hold them: fair refund and cancellation policies, being first to announce a refund when something goes wrong instead of waiting to see what competitors do, giving the person at the counter enough room to make a fair call without being straight jacketed by "company policy".
Then you track it. For us it was NPS, and it was measured across every touchpoint in the customer journey. From the website, the booking flow, the emails, the meal, the airport, the baggage. Including the parts we could not control. If someone had a bad experience at the airport, yes it ruined their overall experience but we wanted to know that. If it affected the customer, we wanted to know it and hopefully fix it.
That is the difference between a service business and a packaged-goods business, and it is worth naming. When I worked in consumer goods the measures were brand consideration, top of mind, brand-lift studies. In aviation, the touchpoint was the brand. The interaction was the whole thing.
You are probably not building an airline. But there are 4 parts that still matter.
One. List what you do not control. Regulation, unit economics, your supplier, your platform's rules, what your category has trained customers to expect. Be honest about how short the remaining list is. That short list is your actual playing field. Start there.
Two. Stop hunting for the gap. If your category genuinely has an unoccupied position, take it. Most do not. Assume you are in a flat market and ask the better question: what is the one thing we will be visibly better at, for one specific kind of person, in a way they can feel without being told?
Three. Replicate it consistently everywhere, not once. This is the line I would put on the wall: do it once and it is creative; do it everywhere, with intent, and it is the brand. The uniform, the packaging, the refund policy, the tone of the email, what the person on the phone is allowed to decide. Any one of them is a nice touch. All of them together, pointed the same way, is a position. Whatever positioning you decide, make sure your customers feel and experience it at every single touch point.
Four. Place profitability over positioning.
A position you cannot sustain is just a campaign.
If you are facing some of these challenges and want to talk, DM me on LinkedIn or send me an email. I read and respond to all of them.
Neel
Marketing and growth, for anyone building a business and a brand.