The “Random Acts of Coolness” promotion from Song Airlines is … very cool.
In six cities beginning today, Song flight attendants and gate attendants will reward customers for being nice by giving them a free round-trip ticket.
Suppose a Song customer gives up their aisle seat so a couple could sit together … that act of coolness by a customer could be rewarded with a free round-trip ticket. Over the next couple of days, Song will be giving away 5,000 free round-trip tickets to such courteous customers.
A traveling curmudgeon, like the one in the NPR story this morning, noted that he’d rather see airlines improve their services than reward customers for good behavior.
The marketing gadfly in me respects the curmudgeon’s take; however, I applaud Song for running the program.
I applaud Song for empowering and trusting their flight attendants and gate attendants to execute this program. Song is not defining what a “cool act” should be. Rewarding a nice customer will be at the sole discretion of the Song employee. That’s cool.
Years ago when I was doing marketing for Starbucks Coffee, we did a few “random acts of kindness” programs where we gave store baristas free drink coupons to randomly reward customers. Ultimately, we stopped doing those programs because we couldn’t “trust” the barista to hand out the coupons to worthy customers and not to their friends.
That is why I applaud Song for empowering and trusting their employees to hand-out $300 round-trip tickets when Starbucks couldn’t trust their baristas to hand-out $3.00 coupons.
Amazing promotion, and great comparison. I'm finding it hard to believe that an airline would hand out tickets like that.
Posted by: Bill | May 27, 2004 at 09:16 PM