The last act of defiance

When times are lean and incomes are down, prices for non-necessities usually get dragged down, too. That’s called the “income” effect, and it’s easy to follow: Incomes down, therefore demand down. Demand down, therefore prices down. Most merchants know this intuitively.

Of course, this stuff can uncork price wars and a race to the bottom, and that’s no fun.

Closer to the disco era than I care to admit, I worked as an airplane flight instructor in California. The “walk in” students would swing by our flight school as one of several they’d visit on the field. Every school, ours included, had a stack of rate sheets, so people could take a copy with them. Even back in the day the lessons amounted to a few thousand dollars.

Our prices were probably about average for the area. Not the highest, not the lowest. We were settled into a cozy niche. Life wasn’t lucrative, but we did turn a profit, and it sure beat the heck out of working for a living.

Well, it’s axiomatic in aviation and tourism that no good situation lasts long enough to enjoy it. Ask any tour agent in Saipan about that one, they’ll agree.

Sure enough, an economic drift-down arrived in the area. Fewer customers came through the doors. And of those who did straggle in, about half of them were fixated on price. They’d ask about prices before asking about the types of airplanes we flew, or before asking to see the training facilities, or before asking about the qualifications of our staff, or before asking about our safety record.

I’d see people sitting in our lobby, where we served free coffee, and they’d spread out the rate sheets from the various schools, find the cheapest hourly price, and that’s where they’d enroll.

Well, you can see the next step coming. Schools started dropping their rates so they could chase these price-shoppers. I watched prices tick down to levels that weren’t sustainable in the long-run. It was the dreaded race to the bottom.

As prices ratcheted down at our airfield, we held fast, thereby becoming the most expensive school in the area by default. So I decided to go Gonzo on the gig, and instead of joining the lemmings, I suggested that we simply accept the “most expensive” position, and yield the price-shoppers to our competition. We’d focus on the other end of the market, and would emphasize what made us a better flight school. True, the price-shoppers wouldn’t listen, but maybe the other people would.

Nervous times, those. At our strategic powwow, I was asked what would happen if my idea backfired. Answer: “Then we’ll go out of business.”

Everyone who mattered was at that powwow, including Sparky. Sparky did our avionics (radio) work and during his idle hours, which was about half the time, he’d play his banjo in the lobby. As we were contemplating the survival of the business, Sparky retrieved a cartoon he kept over his work bench. The cartoon featured a mouse trapped on the pinnacle of a cliff, as a voracious bird of prey was swooping down and about to snatch the mouse with his talons.

The doomed mouse was displaying a rigidly extended middle finger to the predator, flipping the bird to the bird, so to speak.

Caption: “The last act of defiance.”

The cartoon raised our spirits. We stuck by our plan. I wrote some marketing materials, and Sparky and his girlfriend were to work the copy machine the next day and compile the marketing stuff with the rate sheets.

I had to leave town for a few days, but upon my return I was happy to notice that our efforts generated some buzz on the airfield. Sparky’s girlfriend had been handing out their newly made information packets to customers at the airport cafe, along with anyone else who happened to be walking by. It was a creative act of guerilla marketing.

Creative, indeed: Each packet contained not only my marketing prose and the rate sheet, but, yikes, Sparky had seen fit to attach the defiance cartoon.

This was hardly the classy image I sought to portray of our fine academy of the air. But apparently the rogue audacity of it resonated with just the kind of people who have flying in their blood. They’d drop by the school to have a look at things, and most of them liked what they saw.

So there we were: Sparky playing his banjo in the lobby, the regulars drinking coffee and swapping flying stories, and me giving tours of the premises to our newly enrolling students.