Pulling back the curtain
Is the website adequate? Of course it is. It does what a booking website should do I suppose, but it was deficient in delivering the experience I had come to expect from such an elegant airline like Korean Air. After all, the product in the ad campaign is what I expected, but what I see online is not that.
What’s happened here is a perfect case of telling me what I wanted to hear, but falling short in what I expected to see. Has Korean Air oversold their service? In my case, yes, and I would imagine as business owners, we’re all guilty of over selling our service in some capacity. As I described earlier on, it’s often difficult to spot holes in what we envision our businesses to be versus what it actually is, and do we sometimes shoot ourselves in the foot as in the case I’ve made above? The answer is absolutely yes, which is why we all have to constantly reassess our positioning and presentation both verbal and non-verbal.
The virtual booking counter
We don’t know why Korean Air’s web presence falls short of it’s extraordinary ad campaign, or how much they would expect us to overlook while actually booking a flight, but in this case, they’re lucky this is a professional assessment of their advertising, and not their flight competency, based on a failure to complete the experience.
The final analysis
Our businesses may not rely so much on life or death impressions of ad campaigns, but you can rest assured that it is ultimately a matter of lost dollars and cents. This problem is one we all face on a daily basis of over selling what we offer to get the sale, or push the bait, only to be torn down by conditions beyond our control much less ones we can. The smarter money spent is better and more practical management of the things we can control such as how we present our business in the first place by under promising, and over delivering.
