Will Airline Brands Compete to Provide Us with the Funniest Pilots?

If you fly JetBlue, and you’re lucky, your pilot might just be Anne Aldrich. And if your pilot is Anne Aldrich you might hear this over the intercom before you take off:

“My name is Anne, you guys. And I was just out walking around the airplane, and they're throwing the last of your-- I mean, um, I'm sorry about that. I didn't mean to say throwing. I used to work over at American, you know. Old habits die hard. So what I meant to say was, they were lovingly and gently placing your bags in the lower belly, and then we'll be pushing back from the gate on time.”

Ira Glass interviews Aldrich for This American Life and asks what she’s trying to do. “To make people come back to JetBlue,” Aldrich says. I must be a marketer, because after hearing that I got all tingly. And it gets better. “I want them to come back and fly with us. In the short-term, the people that are scared... The people that are scared... they'll come back up to me at the end of the flight and say, I wasn't scared because you made me laugh.”

This is the kind of productive creativity or permisionless innovation that emerges from the bottom-up when a company culture doesn’t hamper employee discretion from the top-down. When you hire quality employees you can count on them to serve the brand in ways that serve the customers, and without having to be told. 

Jet Blue isn’t the only airline with a funny pilot, and they’re definitely not the first. “I rode on a few Southwest flights,” says Aldrich, “and saw—I don't remember what the captain's name was, but he was hilarious. And a number of the flight attendants do it at Southwest. And I thought, I can do this.” Aldrich was delighted, and saw how she could be delightful too while addressing a common customer struggle, fear, with humor. 

The announcements are something Aldrich has since made her own. Although she was nervous to play with them she discovered that she didn’t need to be stoic to be professional. In one of her preflight spiels she tells a story about how back in 1970 when there were no female airline pilots in the U.S. at all she was in the first grade and told her teacher she wanted to grow up to be an airline pilot. Imagine over the intercom, Aldrich telling you:

“She goes, ‘you can't be an airline pilot.’ So a couple of years ago, my son's sitting in first grade. Teacher knows his mom's an airline pilot for JetBlue. His dad's a firefighter out in Phoenix, Arizona. Teacher says, ‘Johnny, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ What do you think my son says? He goes, ‘I want to be a firefighter.’ Teacher says, ‘you don't want to be an airline pilot?’ He goes, ‘airline pilot? Are you kidding? That's a girl's job.’”

By tapping into a personal part of herself and communicating with authenticity Aldrich is able to also communicate authority, further allaying fear while simultaneously entertaining what are often stressed and weary travelers. In a way, this is an example of customer service taking the place of advertising, a trend in marketing we see represented by the success of companies like Zappos, an online shoe and accessories company known for employees who go above and beyond to serve their customers. 

Why shouldn't airlines compete on who has the most effective pilot engagement? This is an overlooked touchpoint but it doesn't have to be. Clearly it's helpful and appreciated. The risks lie entirely in whether pilots can be trusted to properly represent the brand. By encouraging pilots to make the preflight announcements their own way a brand also demonstrates earned confidence in their company culture and hiring practices. 

In addition to serving customers, the enthusiastic, buoyant, just-intimate-enough announcements have the potential to attract employees that will serve the brand's culture particularly well. Quality candidates might realize they're a good fit if they resonate with this fun demonstration of the company culture. 

Again, a parallel can be made to Zappos, a brand that explicitly targets potential employees through demonstrations of their culture. Companies like Google do this too by inspiring articles about the happiness of their employees and inspiring more than one book about their culture and hiring practices. Jet Blue has accomplished something similar through the aired This American Life interview, but these other companies demonstrate that there's clearly something to be said for making communications about culture an express and integral part of marketing strategy. 

At the heart of Aldrich's communications success is her enthusiasm. If the story of a brand in a particular moment is conveyed with helpful flair and fun zest the story we tell ourselves about ourselves—our identity—is elevated and augmented. We become something larger than ourselves. “Become something larger than yourself” is already an element of many brand promises. Aldrich delivers:

“Anyways, you boarded a super hot jet. I love this airplane. It's the Airbus A321. It's all fly-by-wire. Aside from the 727, it's my favorite airplane. We're taken off here in San Diego. We're taking off Runway 27, you guys. We're taking off a weight of 175,000 pounds. Isn't that awesome? Folks, when we leave the concrete, we're doing 165 miles per hour. Get the gear and flaps up. I'm picking it up to 200 and out of 10,000 feet. You know what? FAA says I can go as fast as I want.”

The best marketers ask themselves, “Are we helping the world with this work or detracting from it?” If marketers inspired more Aldriches they could definitely answer "helping the world." I look forward to a future when we actually laugh together before taking off in a plane.