Air Miles Case

The three most important key facts in this case /are:

1: The Air Miles program is a customer loyalty program where consumers can collect ‘Air Miles’ travel miles by purchasing goods and services from selected program sponsors, and exchanging them for air travel on specific airlines.

2: After the first two months of the program, enrollment in Central and Eastern Canada, predominantly in Quebec, had underperformed enrollment in Western Canada.

3: The marketing manager had research developed and conducted to determine awareness of and participation in competitive programs, to assess attitudes and reasons for the regional enrollment differences, to measure the awareness of sponsors, to verify the understanding/misunderstanding of the program, and to determine the effectiveness of the program’s advertising.

SWOT analysis for this case is:

Strengths: New, innovative product/service that allows consumers to spend more, and in turn, receive a superior incentive for their membership; Early, high consumer awareness in the well developed loyalty program.

Weaknesses: Lack of advertising; Failed Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) since consumers were misinformed about program.

Opportunities: Program sponsors were in a wide variety of retail and service categories and were not necessarily travel related which leads to the penetration of different markets (the program would be marketed to consumers outside of the travel industry).

Threats: Competition from other companies; Lack of knowledge of product/service.

The Main Problem(s) / Task(s) to solve/do is/are:

Air Miles’ main issue is that they failed to properly inform the public about their program.

Due to this miscommunication, the AIR MILES company