Not Just a Stunt?

I ran across a story the other day about what appears to be a minor public relations and/or customer relations stunt, but might conceivably evolve into more than that. It made me wonder if the people behind the original stunt are underestimating the potential value of this action – or if they’re already aware of the idea, and are just trying it out small-scale to see how it plays. Considering the source I can’t be sure; I’ll just lay out the facts and let my readers (assuming I have readers) decide…

The original story is from the official blog of RandyTinseth, the Vice President of Marketing at Boeing, and it concerns a modest customer relations effort his staff put together for visiting executives from RwandAir, the national airline of Rwanda. It seems that some people from RwandAir were in Seattle to pick up a new 737 aircraft that had just been completed for them, and Mr. Tinseth arranged to have a local microbrewery bottle and label some special ale for them, which they called RwandAle, reasonably enough. This turned into a really nice photo opportunity for the people from the brewery, the people from RwandAir, and the people from Boeing, and probably cemented several of what were already excellent business relationships. But while this is just a modest stunt, it struck me that it doesn’t have to be…

Suppose, for a moment, that Boeing were to partner with one of the medium-sized brewing companies in the United States – or help create a small division of one of the larger ones. With the introduction of inexpensive printers that can produce professional-grade labels for bottles (including beer bottles) it has become possible for home-brewing enthusiasts to create labels for their own beer – which means there is no reason a large brewery couldn’t create labels for relatively small batches of beer. Suppose Boeing were to offer any airline that buys their product a custom beer label for use aboard the aircraft. In fact, with only a small amount of effort, the resulting joint venture could offer unique beer for specific regions, specific classes, or even specific aircraft. It would take a bit of effort on the logistics side, but as long as the airline had at least one connecting flight landing near at least one interconnected brewery, there’s no reason it couldn’t work…

In management theory this idea is called mass-customization; a familiar example would be those Dell laptops that are configured to the user’s individual specifications (despite being turned out by the thousands in automated factories), but we’re starting to see more and more of these products being offered for sale. I’m not sure how much a custom beer label would be worth to an airline, but the point of the exercise is that it wouldn’t cost either the brewer or the aircraft manufacturer much to create the product in the first place. Airlines have been doing the same basic procedure for years, when they create packets of peanuts or give-away items with the company logo on them, so there’s no reason to believe that this couldn’t work. Granted, airlines based in states or countries where alcohol is taboo wouldn’t be interested in such a tie-in service, but airlines serving locations with beer festivals might make up for that…

This story also brings us to the official blogs supported by Boeing to improve public relations generally while increasing its net presence, all for very low cost and remarkably little effort. I expect we will being seeing more companies starting this practice over the next few years, if only to counter the unavoidable effects of their employees commenting about the company in private blogs – but that’s a discussion for another day…