Importance of Branding in a Digital Era
In today’s rapidly changing and dynamic business environment, companies are becoming competitive through building a brand cheaper, faster, and bigger. It involves generating awareness, social and digital media provide the means of getting new products in front of customers easily and quickly. E-commerce platforms are eagerly anticipating for matching products to customers for distribution and facilitating transactions (swaminathan, 2016). There are reviews engines as well for providing valuable feedback for brands to engage, listen, and iterate in a rapid and responsive product development cycle. There are other factors too that defines the changing brand ambitions and manufacturers adjusting for staying relevant. Companies are building better brand portfolio, leveraging their supply chain and infrastructure for creating efficiencies and then building a market engine on top of that for differentiating the products from competitors (leigh, 2021). The aim of this report is to analyse singapore airlines (sia) branding efforts in terms of building brand equity, brand management across geographical regions, and time and the utilisation of digital tools in a digital era. This report includes comparison of the company with its key competitors as well while making recommendations regarding the way company will be able for undertaking more effective strategic brand management approach.
In a digital era, brand success is used for being measured in distribution and revenue with the goal for creating a billion-dollar brand. Companies are targeting consumers through making a digital reach for audience growth; also, the use of social media is revamping the way brands are introducing and interacting with consumers. This ability of connecting their products with the right consumers define digital advertising, involving influencers and social media to ensure success (gielens & steenkamp, 2019). It involves an importance of brand accountability as well to consumers where the power dynamics has been shifted towards consumers while having unlimited options.
Singapore airlines (sia) is the flag carrier airline, having a hub at singapore changi airport and using the singapore girl as its central figure in corporate branding. It is an excellence, iconic asian brand while having a poise and elegant crew that became a hallmark of consistent brand delivery. Across the globe, sia earned recognition for singapore for promoting similar attributes in their products, staff, and services. The country building its brand attribute of reliability where sia is the torchbearer, playing a leadership role in building brand singapore (song, 2021). As a brand, sia is committed towards the consistent enhancement of the three main pillars of its brand promise that includes product leadership, service excellence, and network connectivity. The company ensure achieving the best of both worlds of service excellence and low-cost operations model along with building brand awareness through social media and content marketing. This helps in generating future opportunity for the company while having more capacity in the global market along withstanding out as a premium brand among its competition (steenkamp, 2020). Sia is using ai (artificial intelligence) as well for building its brand and driving sales; for instance, launching new digital campaign while better targeting new customers and focusing on its marketing efforts. Also, it involves creativity in designing key messages to deliver for the banner adverts powered through its technology partner with appropriate frequency and network. The company also ensure optimisation while performing innovatively and creatively along with premium economy offering, sale fares, and food and beverage onboard, generating most clicks.
Singapore Airlines (SIA) as an Iconic Brand
Sia’s stellar service makes the company a world-class travel brand, providing luxurious flight experiences across cabin classes, with spacious cabins, state-of-the-art entertainment options, and a commitment to making flying a personal experience. The singapore girl define the brand strategy of sia that involves recognising the strong emotional connection of customers with the brand due to its iconic image (danao, 2018). The company’s campaigns and ads are taking varying forms while carrying different messages over the course of time, but through it all. It is based on the way singapore girl present to promote the latest products, launch a new destination, or introduce a new aircraft. Sia’s marketing campaigns includes for instance, advertisements to feature its cabin products while informing traveling public regarding their new innovations (jeon & dodd, 2013). Another example of advertisement is of showcasing several locations to which the company operate. This campaign of singapore girl is aiming towards reinforcing sia forte to be the best in-flight service across the globe.
Moreover, the company is aware regarding its product and price, being strong factors influencing consumer patterns. The singapore girl ad campaign is built, symbolising sia’s asian hospitality and world-class service standards; also, to epitomise the care and warmth for customers, as expected by the company. This ad’s campaign essence remains timeless and long-standing, holding the company’s traditional values of service along with its association with the warm hospitality (sah, 2018). It brings out the romance of travel to life while presenting the diversity of the destinations being served. The different locations include jaisalmer in india, san francisco, wuzhen in china, and paris that were filmed by sia among their unique character that ensures a strong and iconic backdrop to fit for the singapore girl overall. Sia released its first advertisement on youtube, having over 220,000 views through adopting an integrated marketing campaign approach to digital platforms and advertising. It played a key role in all promotional campaigns of sia; also, the company’s online activities include selected social media channels, relevant to complement with the traditional media channels (sia, 2013). These are used for ensuring that the advertising message reaches consumers at several touchpoints.
Other than this, the company ensure recognising people, increasing obtaining information based on their interests and sharing thoughts by new media platforms like youtube as dynamic mechanisms. The purpose of serving videos that are released on youtube is based on seeing great interest from the public in terms of the way ads are put together. Sia thought of sharing ‘behind the scenes’ moments as a better way of introducing its latest ad campaign (bapna, 2021). Youtube as a digital platform is borderless in nature that does not require a fixed geographical location for accessing an ad and to wait for it to come on at a certain day or time. It is considered as an easy source, allowing sia to further bridge a gap among service provider and consumer. The singapore girl is iconic and became the cornerstone of the sia brand philosophy from long while focusing highly on service qualities, possessed by its cabin crew. Both mail and female employees has sarong kebaya uniform that makes a difference while becoming a global marketing icon (lim, 2021). Sia is recognised as one of the most prominent figures in the airline industry and singapore overall through the effective branding efforts as the singapore girl.
SIA’s Service Excellence and Low-cost Operations Model
Sia’s consistency is one of its key strengths where customers expect a certain standard of service and delivery. It is challenging for the company to ensure replicating such consistent levels of delivery over their overall population of the cabin crew, but sia ensure this through having over the crew of 8,000 people, more than one third of them male. The singapore girl worked as a fixture in sia’s ads while possessing the core value of world class service and ensuring success with the most friendly and attentive staff (ong, 2018). Sia create a great brand while living up to the service expectations by the customers; also, the company’s advertising serves reminding people regarding the high levels of service, providing to the customers and needs to work while living up to those expectations in delivery. This defines the brand image of sia while constantly stiving towards meeting the highest standards of customer service and care, fulfilling their promise of being “a great way to fly”. The company ensure product innovation, customer service, and network connectivity as the key pillars, forming the foundation of its competitive offering (cheen, 2020). Sia is committed towards constant innovation and improvement in product and service offerings for providing its customers with the very best premium air travel experience.
Sia became an industry leader which involves no resting on the laurels after introducing new products but moving forward through continuous seeking feedback and comments from their customers for improving its products and services, staying ahead of the game (maszczynski, 2019). The company’s greatest asset is their people and sia ensure investing in them by training along with carrying on with their brand equity growth for ensuring that the singapore girl as the hallmark of gracious service and innovative products of sia remains relevant and timeless in the minds and hearts of its customers (schlappig, 2021). Other than this, sia ensure a sustainable brand differentiation through its brand strategy as the singapore girl is sustainable for the company while having the widest business class bed across the globe, compared to its one of the competitors emirates, qantas group, china airlines, oman air, turkish airlines, and others in terms of product differentiation and having that unique essence.
Sia ensure maintaining its competition in the cut price market and market share while being successful in relation to both a dual brand strategy development and operational efficiency in the airline industry. There are different competencies of the company to achieve from employee branding, positioning, and meeting customer value uniquely compared to its competitors. Sia is defined as one of the best examples in hospitality branding while focusing on employee branding for revamping their operational structure when facing any external influences or internal cost pressures (james, 2019). Sia established and valued a strong relationship with its employees, mainly their flight attendants in terms of being committed to their high-quality services and delivering the brand promise to its customers. Compared to its competitors, sia differentiate itself in terms of both a strong relationship with customers and flight attendants, and the exceptional service provision. This led towards attracting new customers and increasing its brand recognition along with retaining customer loyalty overall. The company’s constant advertising strategy of the singapore girl depicted the typical female sia flight attendant who is dressed in the different sarong kebaya, defined as a simplified version of the traditional attire of malaysia (tee, 2021).
SIA’s Branding and Advertising Campaigns
Furthermore, this turned out to be a marketing tool for the company that worked so well and become of the competitive advantages for sia. Along with ensuring a clear image associated with high-quality service in an extremely competitive industry defines the slim profit margins for the company as well. Sia ensure recruiting the right people, having right attitude, and assessing their fit in its brand image (clark, 2021). Also, the company ensure developing the branding enthusiasm among its workforce with the help of unstructured and structured training programs. This leads towards creating a positive impact on an individual performance and employee commitment towards the organizational goals. Also, this defines the way sia builds a brand from inside out over all communication points of delivering an effective and constant pr and advertising messages depicted through the brand icon, singapore girl. One of its branding efforts include recruitment as well in terms of having clear strategies to first market the brand to its employees. Sia is a customer-oriented company, spending a substantial amount of expense and time to find qualified service personnel. The launching of wax figure of iconic singapore girl in madame tussauds singapore is also one of the branding efforts of sia, defining epitome of hospitality and grace (singapore airlines, 2015). This attract customers at large, aiming towards showcasing the best of singapore as an aspect of marketing while representing, being a leading asian brand.
While making a deliberate decision, sia incorporate the new motif in upcoming branding and marketing assets as well. There is an involvement of employee communication that helps in building the mission and corporate values of sia. Also, the company puts branding efforts in promoting strategic values with the need of managerial attention towards the crew members for interacting directly with customers based on the feedback reports. Sia ensure brand reputation management where the singapore girl has become a very powerful idea of its brand strategy along with becoming a successful brand icon (wang, 2016). The company ensure working with accuracy and consistency when using a brand colour scheme for branding employees as well. There are continuous reinforcement and training programs while aligning physical impressions with brand recognition. This requires building trust through being a solid brand as a leader in their industry and position. It also requires effectiveness and involvement through communication while ensuring to integrate all marketing activities and consistency to delivery its products and services overall (lin, 2015). The overall purpose of sia’s branding efforts is designed regarding increasing its reputation in terms of being an ultimate hospitality brand.
Furthermore, this defines the company’s adoption of process to create, manage, and communicate employee branding, having a powerful influence on the way people feeling in relation to its products and services. The singapore girl defined a brilliant personification of sia’s commitment to service excellence while developing brand recognition and building reputation. In this digital era, sia focused on best technology, innovation, and to offer excellence customer service and genuine quality through branding (bwo, 2021). It involves brand management practices to build the brand, considering promotional activities and offering personalised customer services. The company invested in several innovative activities and retraining employees while putting branding efforts to revamp. It involved using social media platforms such as twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, and more. After the singapore girl, the company launched a “the lengths we go to” Campaign for showcasing the commitment of sia to put its customers first in all its actions (hicks, 2013). Also, this ad campaign emphasised the efforts of the company for providing excellent service along with ensuring brand management across geographical regions and building brand equity while utilising time and digital tools overall.
Digital Marketing Strategies of SIA
Another new brand campaign launched was “we look forward to seeing you in the air again” For winning over the minds, hearts, and wallets of passengers. Sia launched this campaign with a 30-second video while addressing the understandable excitement regarding the long-awaited reopening of international borders after the covid-19 pandemic. Also, several customers were waiting to start making travelling plans again that requires sia to ensure making the in-flight and on-ground experience better (thomas, 2021). During this period, the company scrapped ‘flights to nowhere’ idea to be replaced with new offerings; however, failed to consider the environmental impacts to consumer jet fuel for appeasing a group of restless travellers without a destination in mind. This led towards making decision to conduct a comprehensive review and market study, considering financial viability, environmental implications, and feedback from the public (ragavan, 2020). It defined the marketing plans of sia and putting branding efforts through rolling out new brand campaigns, and unveiling video on sia’s website, youtube, instagram, and facebook pages.
Overall, sia focused on what is important along with consistent building positive branding, accept criticism positively, and re-targeting creatively. Across the globe, branding in a digital era is about putting efforts through focusing on customers, being agile, rethinking on other related opportunities for offering product or service, and being open to criticism. The company is recognised as the standard of quality service compared to its key competitors like emirates, qantas group, china airlines, turkish airlines, oman airlines, and others. Sia ensure continuous growth on the singapore girl ensuring image along with having the extraordinary standards of service and service-related innovations introduction. Based on the above observations, it can be concluded that the company has a successful and unique branding strategy while using effectively integrated customer preferences into external communication along with ensuring long-term growth. However, there is a need of certain recommendations that sia should undertake, ensuring more effective strategic brand management approach. This includes that the company should improve the environmental concerns, impacting the brand image and requires investing digitally for better outcomes. Sia should work on its sustainability aspect as well while providing an appropriate message through using social media platforms and achieving to be the world’s leading digital airline effectively. While staying ahead in the game, the company should world highly among its key competitors through utilising digital tools and managing to build brand equity overall.
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