MKT 6301 Air France Case Analysis - Group10

Air France – Written Case Analysis Background & Key Issues Air France, which came into existence with the merger of five French airlines in 1933, seventyfive years later it had become one of the most efficient in the entire Europe. It was able to provide largest number of connections within the shortest time span. It had also started its flight to United States after World War II. In 2004, it conglomerated with the Netherland-based KLM and created the SkyTeam global alliance. Hence, Air France was growing and expanding at great pace. By the end of 2006-07 fiscal year, Air France-KLM continued to see growth. The global economy grew by 4.9 percent whereas the airline traffic increased by 6.6 percent. Air France was a big client for a media solutions provider firm, Media Contacts. The main aim of Media Contacts here was to optimize the performance and increase the rate of advertisement for Air France with respect to the dollars spent on the search engine marketing campaigns. Now was the time when the search engine marketing was catching up the heat and the revenue because of it was also increasing. So, here the key issue for Media Contacts was to suggest an optimized search engine which could increase their revenue which they were targeting right now. This can be seconded as even the consumers were going online for research and booking their tickets. There was an increase of 263 percentages between 1996 and 2005 in the number of people going online to research and book the tickets. There were many big search engines which were famous and each had their one or the other advantage. The search engines included Google, MSN, Yahoo and Kayak. Media Contacts felt that there might be a case where each search engine might be able to target a particular type of people and cater customers from different background. Hence, the issue that Media Contacts faced was to use one or more of the above mentioned search engines and tries to increase the revenue as much as possible for Air France. Most of the budget was spent on Google adwords. After that came Yahoo. MSN had he highest cost per click in the Stated whereas Overture was at the opposite end. Other key issue which Air France faced was to reduce the air fare prices as there were competitors in that market and they had to do the same to be or remain at the top. They also had to decide whether or not to increase their budget after branding. Also the use of Kayak is a must. The use of metasearch for the brand building and converting the clicks into sale is also very important. These are the major things or issues which need to be kept in mind. 1 This study source was downloaded by from CourseH on :03:37 GMT -06:00 MKT – 6301 Group 10 Industry Analysis