Page 68 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

stand for other things. You must sacrifice.
“NO! We cannot give up that business! We have to say we are this and this

and this! We’re sacrificing opportunity. Forget it!”
Rather than sacrificing opportunities, a narrow focus often creates

opportunities. For vivid proof, consider Scandinavian Airlines. In 1980, faced
with $20 million in losses, SAS executives decided to position the airline as “the
business traveler’s airline.” Listen carefully and you almost can hear, all the way
from Stockholm, the hollering that preceded that decision:

“What, and sacrifice tourist travelers? Run ads with blond Yuppies in Power
Suits? The tourists will ditch us! We have to address them.”

The sacrificers, however, won their argument for the business traveler’s
position. And they won something else: m o re tourist customers.

It worked like this:
SAS created EuroClass for business travelers. EuroClass had olives in the
martinis, bigger seats, phones, telexes, a separate four-minute-faster check-in
counter, and free drinks, newspapers, and magazines.
The move revived SAS: The airline made $80 million profit in EuroClass’s
first year. But something else happened. Because business travelers fly at full
fares, airlines earn much bigger margins on business travelers. By filling up so
many seats with full-fare passengers, SAS could afford to dump prices on the
remaining seats. That is, they could offer even lower fares to tourists.
And they did. Soon, SAS was blessed with the highest percentage of full-fare
travelers of any European airline—and the lowest tourist fares in all of Europe,
too.
In short, positioning SAS as the most desirable airline for business travelers
made it the most desirable airline to business travelers a n d tourists.
Some sacrifice.
To broaden your appeal, narrow your position.

Lesser Logic

Around the time that SAS began its dramatic revival, a New York City law firm
was plotting a similar success. While somewhat inadvertent—as the firm’s
partners now admit—the dramatic ascent of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher &
Flom is yet another example of the power of focus.

First, some background. The best-regarded New York City law firms have
long been dominated by WASP gentlemen from Harvard and Yale and the