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FlyerTalk. Why on earth would Larry Kellner, the ceo of Continental Airlines have dinner with a total stranger who posts as "Cigarman" on FlyerTalk.com, a message board populated by travel enthusiasts? "Well, one Sunday at about 1 a.m., I e-mailed him," says Cigarman, whose real name is Dean Burri, as reported by Susan Stellin in The New York Times. Cigarman, smart smoker that he is, had figured out Larry's email address and had a thing or two to tell him about Continental. Wouldn't you know it -- Larry e-mailed him back within minutes: "Turns out we're both Type A personalities and we both e-mail late at night," Cigarman says. That e-mail exchange led to "occasional dinners" and eventually to a bet between the Cigarman and the Ceo.
"Larry and I were having a disagreement about the power of a site like FlyerTalk ... I was telling him that I think it's very important that travel companies watch these sites, for the good and the bad, because rumors get blown out of proportion. He said there's not more than 60 people on FlyerTalk, flyertalk.com, who fly Continental on a regular basis. I told him he was crazy, so a wager ensued." The bet was that if more than 60 FlyerTalk members paid their own way to Houston, Larry would buy them dinner, give them a special airport tour and answer their questions. Suprise-surprise: A total of 274 Continental loyalists showed up ... and, according to Cigarman, the "give-and-take" was "like Oprah." Take that, JetBlue.
An interesting turn of events indeed, especially when you consider that Continental generally keeps a certain distance from sites like FlyerTalk: "When we see something that's factually incorrect, we'll work with the moderator, but we don't like to put our own posts on there," says Mark Bergsrud, Continental's marketing veep. Taking a slightly more proactive approach, a Flyertalk regular known as Starwood Lurker spends up to eight hours a day monitoring and sometimes subtly posting on behalf of Starwood Hotels. FlyerTalk's founder, Randy Petersen, also editor of InsideFlyer, insideflyer.com, magazine says he's surprised by all the airline involvement: "I was almost taken aback at how well Continental embraced that event," he says, "the biggest guys in the company rubbing elbows with some mileage fanatics."
The Joneses. You want a car just like your neighbors' not because you envy them, but because you trust them, suggests David Leonhardt in The New York Times (6/13/05). That conclusion is offered in a working paper by a trio of economists -- Mark Grinblatt, Matti Keloharju and Seppo Ikaheimo -- who studied consumers in Finland, a wealthy country where "amazingly detailed records" of consumer purchases are maintained. What they found was this: "When one of person's 10 nearest neighbors bought a car, the odds that a person would buy a car of the same brand during the next week and a half jumped 86 percent."
Twist is that "used cars ... seemed to affect neighbors even more than new cars. Low-income families and those who lived in rural areas -- not the typical conspicuous consumers -- were more likely to be influenced by their neighbors than were wealthy Helsinki residents." Because used cars typically are less reliable, it seems that what people covet is not so much their neighbors' car, but their advice. In addition, because less affluent consumers typically have "less access to car magazines and the internet" they would seem more likely to consult with their friends.
Here in America, surveys have shown a similar pattern, suggesting that "as people get closer to buying a car, they switch from paying attention to television and magazine ads to newspaper ads and the internet ... But the opinions of their friends and colleagues remain a crucial influence at every stage." That sort of buzz-factor has afforded only faint hope to GM and Ford, whose "reputations ... have fallen so far that one third of their sales go to employees, the friends or relatives of employees, or rental car companies, all at almost no profit." However, as David Leonhardt points out: "If a few of their cars can break through consumers' skepticism, entire neighborhoods" might follow. You can download a PDF of the paper at anderson.ucla.edu.
Tim Manners, editor
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