The air travel markets across the world are capital intensive, highly competitive and driven by purchasing power of the people which makes marketing activities inevitably vital to ensure competitive edge.
In acknowledgement of this fact, most airlines are doing just about anything in order to remain relevant and still meet the ever dynamic needs of the passengers.
Studies have shown that for these airlines to survive the competition in their industry, they need to take their marketing strategies very seriously.
The global world of business today is a very dynamic one, in order to satisfy the ever changing needs of customers, organisations must first know their needs and ensure such needs are met with the services they provide (Smith and Reece, 2012).
Experts have therefore suggested that for airlines to survive in today’s competitive market, it has to treat the marketing drive of its business with top priority to ensure adequate business performance.
Nigeria is the most populous black nation on earth, with an estimated population of 174 million people, is the biggest economy in Africa and being very centrally located within Africa presents the world aviation market with certain geographical and economic advantages which a well-run airline can easily take advantage of if there are implementation of good marketing strategies.
Ogungbangbe Thomas-Olaleye, the CEO of CITA Aviation Fuelling Company noted at his public lecture on ‘Strategies and business performance of domestic airlines in Nigeria’, that previous research indicates that several factors that influence business performance are professional background of the owners, their entrepreneurship capabilities and preferences, cultural and religious beliefs, inadequate marketing strategies, marketing research, as well as the technology and micro environment.
Thomas-Olaleye reiterated that marketing is one of the most important aspects of any business and airlines are not an exception.
According to him, “Marketing strategy embraces major fundamental components of marketing practice. Despite this importance, airline industry in Nigeria has been unable to grow, expand and be strong enough to attract more Nigerians to travel by air, and this has contributed to excess capacity leading to huge economic losses in terms of potential turnover of air travellers not captured as passengers by the airlines.
“Executives in Nigerian airline industry have not been market driven as they lagged behind in adopting marketing concept and other promotions bringing about performance below capacity and inability to provide quality services.
“All these problems necessitated the need to evaluate the relationship between marketing strategies and business performance of domestic airlines in Nigeria.”
He disclosed that the study he conducted on marketing strategies for the airlines in Nigeria showed that poor marketing strategies were responsible for the low business performance of airline operators in Nigeria.
Thomas-Olaleye also revealed that the study recommended that the airline industry should aggressively be market driven by adopting marketing concept, marketing strategies should be seen as an investment to improve business performance with a view to meeting continuous and changing demand of customers.
He stressed that airline operators should interact with and respond to internal and external market factors to maintain equitable working balance among the interest groups.
“To unlock the unprecedented returns in the Nigeria Airline industry, we need to look at the market share, working capital, customer satisfaction, and profitability of these airlines. To achieve all of these, the marketing factors like Sales Growth, direct marketing, mouth to mouth marketing, online marketing, and transactional marketing are not negotiable,” he said.
He said recommendation for airlines is the need for airline operators to see marketing as a strategic tool to survive and prosper in a turbulent environment that demands both financial performance and effective stakeholder responsiveness.
He suggested that in order to get around these issues, the efforts of airline operators must be directed towards harnessing the non-economic and long run effects of marketing strategies to achieve corporate visibility, enhanced public image and viability.
Thomas-Olaleye also suggested that regulatory agencies such as Nigerian Airspace Management Authority (NAMA), Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) and Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), should collaborate and intensify their efforts in the monitoring of strategies that leads to profitability as a way of promoting the financial health of the Nigerian Aviation sector.
Ifeoma Okeke
