KingFisher the Bird that will Never Fly Again

What happened to Kingfisher Airlines

May 9th, 2005, was the day when with the full power of Rolls Royce engines a brand new Airbus A320 in red and white color took off from the runway at Bangalore International Airport. It was the day when a Kingfisher Airlines took its first ride to explore the Indian sky. Businessman Vijay Mallya’s newest idea was ready to revolutionize air travel in the world and India became one of the biggest competitors for airlines like Singapore Airlines and Virgin Atlantic. I was considered to be a market-changing strategy in the Aviation industry where the return is just 4%. It was a venture that looked absolutely picture-perfect on the drawing board. But everything changed soon, Mallya’s Kingfisher soon turns into a giant albatross around his neck.

In a country like India, how do you advertise a brand of beer in a surrogate manner? Launching an eponymous airline would certainly be an unorthodox way. After all, beer and airlines have little in common, except for the fact that they both make people fly. The UB Group, however, chose to do precisely that. But this was no ordinary airline. Kingfisher ushered in the elements of glamour, luxury, and style to the world of air travel. It intended to dominate the Indian aviation market, with a superior offering, at a price that didn’t seem outrageous. Well, Kingfisher achieved all that and more. It soon became India’s airline of choice, providing the finest flying experience in the Indian skies. Awards poured in and a prestigious five-star rating by Skytrax soon followed. The likes of Jet Airways and Air India were soon left far behind in KFA’s tailwinds. The airline continued to add planes to its fleet, inducting at least one new aircraft every month. Its route network soon began to touch every major Indian city and several tier-2 cities as well. All this, however, came at a price. KFA was losing money in crores on a daily basis and pretty soon, it began knocking on banks’ doors for funds and the banks, putting their faith in the UB Group’s financial muscle, had no hesitation in loosening their purse strings but as beauty is not permanent, so everything did not go as it was planned and at last Kingfisher was left with around 8000 crores of debt.

Now, this is something about its financial activities, I’m here to discuss its marketing strategies. Why the red bird failed to took off is just one story what was the impact on the consumer was another story. Everything about Kingfisher has an element of red in it, be it the air hostesses’ uniforms, its aircraft, or even their interiors. Kingfisher Airlines was considered to be a luxury airline with all sorts of facilities. Its hospitality techniques were taken as a case study not only this King Fisher The airline, on the whole, was a case study in B School. But today its failure is a case study. Kingfisher, in order to keep its customer happy, used to give take-home a gift such as iPod, Magazine, and more. But slowly-slowly as the cloud started to surround it financially it started to compromise on the facilities and this did not go with customers because here comes the concept of Branding.

This tells that if a customer is satisfied with the product then His/ Her expectation increases and if the expectation is not meet then it creates a Hollow Branding, where either customer starts spreading bad word of mouth or switch the brand. A company that once enters the concept of hollow branding becomes very difficult to come out of it. Thus it is advisable to offer only such features where the company knows what the expectation level of its customers is. This is why the reason because iPhone 4 Failed.