Ramblings of a Marketing Gurl: Bait and Switch

Southwest Airlines' March Facebook campaign is currently promoting $59 one-way flights. Except, I can't fly out from a major metro area to another major metro area for that price. And while $93/flight is a good price, it's not even close to the sweet FB deal. This is a good way to tick off customers who aren't loyal to the brand. What's worse is that the landing page that houses this offer has the cities in alphabetical order; a logical way to default sort it, but the flight prices are so not on "sale" for most one-way flights. I feel like I've been misled, again, by a deceptive sponsored ad.

The sponsored ad starts pretty well with all the right components in it that communicate brand, offer, and a call-to-action.

Sponsored Ad screenshot, 2013-03-08

And then, after the hook (click-through), the experience quickly nosedives into the ground.

Landing page mirrors the FB-pushed ad. Good right? Keep scrolling down...

You think you are going to get a good deal, until you can't actually find a deal for your metro area. Seattle, for example:

If Southwest had used regional ad targeting on FB,
I would not have been pitched this offer.
Maybe? One could only hope social media ad tech advances to this level.

Serena Y. Hsi, MBA

Welcome to my ramblings about marketing techniques, insights, business models, and perspectives on what companies do to bring products and services to market. My marketing work encompasses corporate and agency marketing handling many aspects within the marketing discipline: competitive intelligence, market strategy, market research, consulting, customer segmentation, database marketing, and identifying better customer acquisition methods and cross-sell opportunities.

The strength of a company's product or services should be as strong as its business strategy and marketing insight into its own industry. My passions are marketing and technology, which just happens to also be my career path.