A concept that came up early in my marketing class at Cornell is that customers don’t by drills, they buy holes. The point being that no one really wants a drill because they want a drill, but that they want a drill because they need a hole in something. If something comes along that can make holes better than a drill, you can count on the market demand for drills declining.

This got me thinking about the analogy in the airline business. What are customers of airlines really buying? A plane ticket? A plane ride? Hospitality? It seems to me that customers buy plane tickets because they need to get from one place to another. But if you consider it for a moment, airlines don’t really fulfill that service. What do I mean? Well, when was the last time you said, “I think I need to go to O’Hare”, or “a trip to La Guardia sounds fun”? More likely, you needed to attend a conference in Schaumburg or make a business presentation in Manhattan. If you are sitting in Pittsburgh, that means that the airlines only provide a piece of the service that you really need. In other words, airlines don’t provide the service of moving passengers from where they are to where they want to go. Instead, airlines tell their customers to get their items together and be at an airport close to their origin 2 hours before flying out, and then they transport their customers to a an airport closest to the their destination. From a marketer’s perspective, airlines are focused on selling seats on airplanes instead of providing the service that customers are really looking for.

This concept has been bouncing around in my head for the past few weeks, and this evening I learned of a tiny movement in the direction of really providing true point-to-point transportation services. EL AL Airlines has recently introduced an early, at-home check-in service. The service is only available in Israel, though, and as such, only helps with connecting the dots on the point-of-origin side of the trip. But, it’s a start, and I’ll be curious to see how it pans out for EL AL and if anyone else copy-cats it.

Charles Revson of Revlon Cosmetics once said, “In the factory we make cosmetics, but in my stores we sell hope”. What are airlines selling? I would say most are just selling seats on an airplane.