Aviation Marketing Intelligence

Being a German workaholic, my father came to America in the late 60’s with a few hundred bucks (most of which disappeared into the pockets of his fellow immigrant taxi driver upon arrival in New York).  Nevertheless, he retired a successful business man with a multi-million dollar company.  As I was reminded daily as a child, he worked his butt off doing everything he could to succeed, and built a plastics company from the ground up.  Nothing was given- everything was earned. It was this obsession with perpetual labor that convinced me that this was a man who would never retire.  Nothing shy of death would stop the man who was impervious to the concept of “time off” from not clocking in 6 to 7 days a week. Needless to say, it came as a surprise when I got that late summer phone call telling me he was selling the company and calling it quits.

Dad was quick to allay my fears of terminal illness or dementia. Ultimately, it was marketing that got him in the end. Dad always took care of everything for himself, trusting none but his two giant, calloused hands to cover ever detail from turning the heat on in the morning to firing up the machinery, then into the front office donning a suit and tie to shake hands, wheel and deal, and watch the business boom. Then the playing field changed.

With the advent of technology, Dad found he could no longer hold the reins and control every aspect of his business. He named the company ‘Approved Color’ for the quaint notion that when folks looked under plastics in the phonebook, he would be the first name they would see, thus giving him a ‘heads up’. That was the way it worked in “the good old days”: Marketing was regional and alphabetized.  The Internet changed that.  The World Wide Web meant that you were no longer competing with the guy down the road or maybe over the state line.  You were now getting competition from Honduras and orders from Bulgaria.  It was too much for a man who had forsworn technology as the Antichrist - after all, if you couldn’t fix it with duct tape, it must be evil.  He couldn’t understand how to gain presence on something as huge and mind boggling as the Net. Being German, he was too stubborn to either learn how to use it or to get someone else to do it for him.  In the end, he took the nuclear option and closed shop, passing it off to the next generation.

In my daily contact with clients, I see the same thing.  Net-phobia causing the hands on business geniuses to give into fear of the unknown and quit the race long before it is run - and we are suffering for it.  Ironically, with a little time and modest effort, they could easily become Net-savvy and learn to do it themselves. If an eight year old can set up a website about their webkin teddy bear, a fifty year old pilot can set up a website about their Learjet.  It’s simply a matter of talking to the right folks and giving it a go.  Even my technophobe dad who gave up his company for fear of his computer now whiles away his retirement flooding my Inbox with html coded emails spilling with links to his website, his grandchildren’s homepages, fishing buddies, the hotel he slept in last month, etc., etc.  Actually, it kind of makes me nostalgic for the good old days when I could ask the post office to trash my junk mail….

–Dan

p.s. If you’ve enjoyed this post… don’t hesitate to see how I spend my day job helping air carriers of all sizes gain presence and learn the skills necessary to keep the pipeline full of ideal customers.

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