Reflective Essay Sample
China Southern Airlines enjoys a large following and customer base within China. It is known for cheap flights with a large number of destinations around Asia. However, it lacks adequate exposure in other regions around the world. As a result, it faces significant business challenges such as; limited brand awareness outside Asia, poor customer service on its online platform, high competition from other airlines, and poor customer retention. These problems hinder its ambition to benefit from the more significant global market. Nevertheless, dedicated content and content strategies have the potential to help the company improve its international prospects by attracting more loyal consumers.
One of the main reasons why the company faces challenges with brand awareness and competition is its failure to create a unique value for its services. According to Porter (1996), an appropriate strategy involves being deliberately different from competitors by choosing a proper mix of values to follow. When targeting to be the cheapest airline, it may have to employ tradeoffs with other commonly offered services to satisfy its market (Porter, 1996). Therefore, the company should focus on its niche of providing cheap and readily available services for it to have a competitive advantage over other airlines.
On the other hand, customer service and retention are improvable by focusing on the quality of the content offered on online booking websites. Reviews of the airline indicated that most of its customers find its website to be complicated and hard to understand. Kissane (2011) outlined how good content should be concise, clear, and user-centered. Implementing such practices in China Southern Airlines’ website design will work to improve customer service and the loyalty of its market base.
Reference
Kissane, E. (2011). The Elements of Content Strategy. New York: A Book Apart. (Chapters 1-2)
Porter, M. (1996) “What is strategy?” Harvard Business Review’s 10 Must-Read on Strategy (pp. 4-34). Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.
