Southwest airlines
A southwest airline is an airline established and incorporated in America. It is the largest airline in terms of customer served per year in the world. It also has the third largest number of aircrafts in the world. On average south west operates about 3500 flights per day. The company started more than 38 years ago. Southwest aims at ensuring that its customers get to their destination within the shortest time possible while paying the lowest fares possible. The airline is characterized by having only one type of aircraft, the Boeing 737. The airline’s mission is ‘dedication to the highest quality of customer service with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and company spirit’ the company has got clearly set out policies for unaccompanied minors, as well as customers with disability thus making it all an encompassing.
Strategy description
This marketing strategy called “setting the buying criteria” was developed by Ryan Healy, a freelance copy writer and was published in the Ezine articles. The strategy is about how a company can make its prospective customers make a buying decision. The strategy involves setting a buying criteria in the marketing material used by the company, be it brochures, sales letters or the internet. You define the characteristics of a good buying behavior. In setting these criteria, you need to be keen to exclude your competitors from being in a position to qualify to the criteria. The criteria should also not exclude all competitors. It should however sufficiently narrow the competition field to a manageable level. In other words it should to a larger and lesser extent be exclusive. For example in our case the southwestern airline may develop buying criteria such as ‘stable working conditions, equal opportunity for learning etc’. such a criteria would help the airline attract more qualified human resource as well as keeping its human resource together.This strategy is effective into luring potential customer become customer. The strategy for one allows the prospective customer to see your company as trustworthy or one that can be trusted. By telling them what to look for in the product they are about to buy you build some trust in yourself in the eyes of the customer. Secondly the strategy lets the prospective customer make their own conclusions. By telling what to watch out for, you are not telling them to buy your products about you are indirectly giving them guidelines for making a purchase or make a conclusion. Lastly the strategy means that you will be going a step further and doing a different thing from your competitors. In setting the criteria, you should be able to define your buying criteria, position your criteria, and provide the reasons why the criteria is the way it is.
Strategy application
The strategies can be applied in human resources management in the southwest airlines. This can very well apply to those employees of other competing airlines who would like to work for Southwestern and also to keep the employees of the airline i.e. to prevent staff turnover. The strategy would include outlining the benefits that the employees would get that other airlines would not offer. This would act South western’s buying criterion. The criterion would probably read like, ‘a good pay, pension plan, insurance policy, two days off per week’. Probably not all airlines could be offering these benefits to its employees. This will make southwestern to have an advantage in securing and maintaining customers. The thing is any person looking for these benefits would consider working for south western since it has already outlined what the staffs are looking for.
Strategy implications
Organizational credibility pertains to extent an organization’s organizational trustworthy or legitimacy in the eyes of the stakeholders who include the shareholders, the clients, business partners as well as the general public (Luo, Y., 2007, p.221). Credibility is important for a firm to build and maintain good relations with the other parties or the stakeholders. Credibility emanates from the firm’s reputation, customer loyalty, trustworthiness, social image, etc (Luo, Y., 2007, p.221). Setting a buy criterion for southern airline would help to build and maintain organizational credibility. This is because the criteria would to a large extent portray how the airlines staff as well as staffs front other airlines perceive the airlines management. This help create a good image fop the company and thereby helping in building credibility. As stated earlier good credibility come simple things such as the company’s image, customer satisfaction etc. this strategy can therefore be very efficient in creating, building and maintaining a good organizational credibility for the airline. Consider for example if south western developed criteria that emphasized on its role and measures to conserve the environment. This would create a situation where the general public would see the company’s corporate social responsibility and therefore improving on the credibility.
Organizational change can take two main dimensions, the gradual change or the radical or transformative change (Denison, R., 2001, p.104). Scholars recommend a separate strategy to bring about organization change, though some hold to the school of thought that the business strategies such the marketing strategies can be used to bring about organizational change. If business strategies are to be used to bring about organization change then the change can only be a gradual one since radical changes calls for transformation of the entire organization, or a major one on the organization’s structures. Use of business strategy to bring about organization change is a long process. The process involves using the business strategy to come up with an organization strategy which is then used to develop a human resource management strategy. The human resource management strategy is used to affect people and bring about organizational change (Burke, W., 2002). In our case we want to use the business strategy to provide improved exposure for human resource management and thereby enable organization change. Suppose for example southwestern airline developed a strategy of increasing the number of passengers using its Boeing 737. This would call for a buying criteria designed to make prospective clients decide to fly on a south western flight. We assume that the strategy succeeds and customer base increases. This would in turn call for a strategy to ensure that our staff dedicates themselves to serving the increasing number of passengers. The need to improve our human resource management would actually increase. In other words our buying strategy to increase our passenger’s base thus leads to more attention on human resource management. We therefore create a strategy to manage our human resources. This, in the long run will bring about organizational change (Denison, R., 2001, p.105).
Conclusion
Certain marketing and sales strategies may be developed by the organization to achieve diverse objectives,, such wining or maintaining clients and staffs, improving human resource management or even bringing about organizational change.
Reference List
- Burke, W.W. (2002). Organization change: theory and practice. New Delhi: Sage
- Denison, R.D. (2001). Managing organizational change in transition economies. Newyork: Lawrence Erlbaum associates, Inc
- Luo, Y. (2007). Global dimensions of corporate governance.MA: Blackwell Publishing