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Airport arrivals lounges were
offered to BA passengers to enhance
their experience of traveling with the
airline. Rather than cutting prices, BA
chose to focus on customer service.
tactic was not to cut air fares but
to offer better customer service.
Marshall saw that the customer
experience went beyond check-in,
in-flight, touchdown, and passport
control, and he introduced the
world’s first arrivals lounges.
Customer experience
Other full-service airlines have
adapted the BA model. Most
airlines now rely on optimizing
customer relationships in order to
gain a long-term, competitive
advantage. United Airlines, for
example, has implemented a
system that lets staff identify high-
value frequent flyers and proactively
offer them special services if their
flight is canceled. American Airlines
has promoted its use of technology
to make the flight experience more
appealing for customers, becoming
the first with permission from the
Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) to allow flight attendants to
use tablets to help them manage the
onboard experience more efficiently.
It was the first major commercial
airline to provide branded tablets to
First Class and Business passengers
for inflight use. Enhancing a
customer experience through
internet access and applications on
iPads, tablets, and cell phones is
now a vital consideration in many
sectors of industry, something on
which Google has capitalized.
In 2005, Google purchased a
little-known company called Android
Inc., which was developing a
smartphone platform. Two years
later Apple released its iPhone and
rapidly dominated the market;
customers loved it since they could
replicate the world of the Internet
on a handheld device. Online
search giant, Google, saw that it
risked becoming beholden to Apple
for access to sell its applications so,
with other cell-phone makers, it
developed an alternative—an open-
source operating system that would
work on all mobile devices. Google
now had a platform through which
it could generate profit with sales of
applications and in-app advertising.
Kotler cites Google as a model
of innovation, always seeking new
ways to solve customers’ problems
and help them manage vast amounts
of information. Levitt would have
agreed with the first line of Google’s
corporate philosophy: “Focus on the
user and all else will follow.” ■SUCCESSFUL SELLING
Theodore Levitt
Acknowledged as one of the
most original management
thinkers of the modern age,
Theodore “Ted” Levitt was
born in Vollmerz, Germany but
emigrated to the US with his
family at ten. He served in the
US Army during World War II,
returning to enroll at Ohio
University. With his PhD in
Economics, he joined the
faculty of Harvard Business
School in 1959, writing his
famous article “Marketing
Myopia” just a year later. For
the next 30 years he taught at
Harvard, contributing 26
articles to the Harvard
Business Review, of which
he was chief editor from 1985
to 1989. In its 2004 edition,
the journal cited marketing
myopia as the most influential
marketing idea of the past
50 years. Levitt created a
similar stir in 1983 with
another article, “The
Globalization of Markets,”
which led to him being
credited with popularizing
the term “globalization.”Key works1960 “Marketing Myopia,”
Harvard Business Review
1983 The Marketing
ImaginationMarketing is not the art
of finding clever ways to
dispose of what you make.
It is the art of creating genuine
customer value.
Philip Kotler