Aviation Marketing Intelligence

The world of private aviation marketing savants may not be accustomed to reaching into the well of 1980’s cult television, but . . . . sometimes we must. Not only that, smart people who study strategy and management have shown that Faceman, Hannibal, B.A. and Murdock have something larger than themselves to share with us.

If the management of any company were to define risk as the integration of different business units and how well they perform together, the A-Team is one of the best examples of the typical integration of those units. To use the “your business as an engine” analogy…. any contemporary engine, be it a diesel or turbine engine, has a lot of moving parts. As long as they all do their job (to the tolerances the engineer specified) then the goal of power output is achieved. The failure or degradation of one part, however, especially at 4,000 or 40,000 RPM, can lead to disaster or in a best case scenario, tremendous inefficiency.

That is what makes the A-Team such an interesting case study: Knowingly putting themselves into high risk (a/k/a 40,000 RPM situations) time and again, they always come out unscathed in their wonderfully scripted cartoon explosion and action fueled episodes. In fact the recipe for their rising action, confrontation and solution is also classically defined and continued. (There are websites that allow you to build your own episode.) A local tech pundit even quipped, “The casting for the show was seemingly done out of some MIT Sloan School of Management playbook.”

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Popularity: 21%

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.

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Popularity: 35%