MARKETING STRATEGIES

British Airline - Marketing Strategies

Introduction

British Airways (BA) is among the largest contributors to the United Kingdom's economy, as the airline alone stands to be the largest scheduled international airline in the UK. The strength of the airline not only stands as the largest scheduled airline in UK but BA is also amongst the leading airlines of the world. Besides the scheduled service that the airline offers in the country of origin and in the international forum, the corporation is involved in freight business as the airways is leading operations in carriage of freight, mail, and ancillary services at both the domestic and international arena (Datamonitor, 2008).

British Airways has many associations and with the help of code sharing and building franchise partnerships, the corporation has enabled itself to make extensive measures of flying to more than 300 destinations all around the world. The airline is capable of achieving new milestones every time, as in the year 2007/2008, a year before the economic downturn or the economic crisis the airline carried more than 33 million passengers within a year. In this year, BA earned remarkable revenues of £8.7billion (British Airways, 2008). Moreover, just before the global recessionary trend, the corporation had an employee headcount of more than 42,000 employees and the corporation still manages to keep similar employee headcount.

From the time when British Airways privatized in 1987, the corporation has become a healthy competition for the overall aviation industries, as worldwide BA is respected as a competitive airline that can handle pressures from the giant corporations in the aviation industry. However, it is not as easy as how it seems the global airline or aviation industry is a fiercely competitive industry. Moreover, the industry is heavily regulated by all possible authorities, which include local and international bodies that are concerned with aviation industries and set standards according to the regulations required in order to control the airlines. In addition, the industry is highly exposed to regular behavioral changes for the customer and similarly the industry and airlines are affected by the customer confidence, which is one association that strengthens the competition factor in the industry, resulting into variations in the market share of airlines (Dooley, 1999, pp. 358).

The company has strong competitive ties within the local boundaries and outside the boundaries in the international arena. British Airways has a local rivalry with British Caledonian; the local competitor in the origin also stands as the second largest airline. In the aviation industry, competition and rivalry is based not on number of passengers but the measurement is based on the routes and airport terminals. British Airways has many competitors due to the reason that the airline has its aircraft situated on all important routes and airport terminals, which are important for attracting the consumers. The main international rivals for BA are American Airlines, Virgin Airline, Delta Airlines, etc (Sustar, 2005, pp. 302).

Discussion

British Airways has always been among those corporations, which have a constant eye on achieving growth and spending billions just for to ...