Singapore Airlines Brand Strategy

Singapore Airlines (SIA) participated in the aviation sector in 1974; it has grown from a regional airline to become one of the first airlines to be rated 5 stars in the world. Besides, it also performs better strategy to build a system image brand identity with the iconic Singapore Girl. Singapore Airlines is the national airline of Singapore; with headquarter operations centers are located at the Changi International Airport. Currently, Mr Goh Choon Phong takes up the CEO position, replacing Chew Choon Seng, who retired at the end of 2010. Mr Chew stated that it was the time for him to hand over to the next generation and move on (Singapore Airlines, 2011). Singapore Airlines owns the airline is SilkAir 100%, since 1989; Scoot 100%, since

Analysis

1.1. Multi-brand Strategy

The Multi-brand strategy trend has appeared over the last decade in the Asian airline sector which is defined as the depth of a branding strategy concerns the number and nature of different brands marketed in the product class sold by a firm (Hemant Kombrabail). One of the leaders of the trend is SIA which was not the first full-service airline group in Asia-Pacific to establish a low-cost carriers (LCCs) subsidiary but it was one of the early adapters which put it in position to get benefit from the huge raise at the bottom end of the market.

SIA’s Chief Executive Goh Choon Phong stated that SIA is relying on a multi-brand strategy and stepping up its exposure to the budget airlines segment (Anshuman Daga, 2013). Brendan Sobie, chief Centre for Aviation (CAPA) pointed the same economical advantage by indicating that “the biggest change of SIA is the low cost and multi brand strategy, focusing more on Silk Air, launching Scoot and increasing their involvement in Tiger” (Anshuman Daga,

The company introduced a lot of “first” things for many years in the airline industry, and it will continue to do so. “SIA’s approach to innovation involves the seamless combination of, on the one hand, hard structured, rigorous, and centralized innovation, and on the other hand, soft, emergent, distributed, but equally significant innovation” (Heracleous, Wirtz, & Johnston, 2005). On 2010, Loizos Heracleous and Jochen Wirtz stated that “SIA sustains innovation by using a structured, rigorous, and centralized process along with an emergent, distributed, and local process. The former is the skeleton, the latter the flesh and blood; together, they provide customers with a body of novel services at a low cost”. On the other hand, SIA also use Decentralized Innovation to encourage innovation at lower level: “SIA uses its distributed innovation approach for efficiency. Not only is this approach cost-effective, but the process ensures that innovations are developed in accordance with operational realities, making it easy to implement them. Tensions sometimes erupt between central and local innovation, but SIA encourages both because they complement each other. Distributed innovation helps sustain service excellence which requires every part of a customer encounter be outstanding” (Loizos Heracleous and Jochen Wirtz, 2010). Centralization and Decentralization are the twin elements which support each other and lead to the high