Low cost airlines' Marketing choices. Some empirical cases.

This paper analyzes how Low Cost Airlines (LCA) choose marketing strategies and how they decide where to compete in the air transportation market. Liberalization has brought about numerous advantages to European travellers, both in terms of higher quality offered by airlines and drastic price reductions. However, one of the main and most interesting aspects of the free market has been the entry in the industry of LCA. Our main research hypothesis is to verify if some strategic resources for LCAs lie in their different marketing polices (product, price, promotion and placement) and in the way they are mixed. Therefore, this study is focused to analyze whether there is a significant difference in LCAs' strategies, with particular reference to product differentiation, price level and the choice of innovative channels in promoting places and products. A double level analysis is applied, through the case study method, to compare marketing strategies of the main LCAs in European airlines industry: 1) marketing choices and connected resources; 2) deep interviewing process to CEO/general managers/marketing managers, aimed at pointing out more hidden sources of competitive advantage, under completion.