In one of the most interesting and ballsiest examples of guerilla consumer research I've ever heard of, Dustin Curtis (of Dear American Airlines fame, blogged about in threeminds) and Alaska Miller have set out to visit every JetBlue city using the "unlimited jetting" pass. Here is the letter he wrote to JetBlue:
"Dear JetBlue, We are Dustin Curtis & Alaska Miller, and we need your help. We're going to use the All You Can Jet pass to visit every jetBlue-served US city between September 8th and October 8th. There are 43 of them, and we've booked almost 90 flight segments. Because we're going to be intimately acquainted soon, we'd like to explain why we're doing this. (And then we have a tiny favor to ask.)"
Oh and you can follow along with his flights here (they started on Tuesday) or his twitter stream.
The sheer possibilities for collecting consumer insight into the airlines industry and JetBlue customers in particular will be incredible! But here are some other things I've been thinking about...
How should JetBlue leverage this unique opportunity?
JetBlue should be publicizing this with their people. The customer service failure potential is pretty high, while the chance of a customer service win is probably pretty low. Already Alaska Miller has posted two comments about their service.
They could also begin to use this as a vehicle for their own buzz campaign. Leverage the fact that Dustin and Alaska are NOT doing this on American Airlines, they chose JetBlue because of the promotion and because they don't mind flying with JetBlue.
What other data besides stories could they be collecting?
In fact, it would be great to see JetBlue post a parallel story, maybe the story behind the trip: notes from flight crew, details on what's going on with weather, mechanicals, Obama landing at JFK, etc. Why not post some metrics for the flights: on time gate departure, wait time due to mechanical versus weather versus TSA versus traffic.
One of the things that hit me living in New York was that while Times Square is always a sea of random global humanity gawping at flashing signs, if you walk through Times Square (as I had to do to get to the office) you see an amazing difference. Did you know those signs CHANGE every 2-3 days sometimes? Things are always in motion. I was fascinated by the temporal aspect of Times Square, not the flashing lights themselves. Personally, I'd love to see how often they come across the same flight crew. I think most people (only frequent travelers) don't see the temporal aspect of an airport or an airline (we are there momentarily then gone). Why not describe how JFK changed over the month (signs, staff, weather, busyness)?
I like that Dustin and Alaska are crowd sourcing the trip visualization (posting ideas, collecting feedback, adapting), but they need even more graphic visualization (think weather radar, sped up animation of the trip). I'd like to see something like this as the FINAL output.
Dean McRobie
Strategists & Planners
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