Jet Lite vs Jet Airways Konnect

Jet Airways is reportedly planning a brand consolidation, reducing the currently used three brands, Jet Airways, the full-service airline, Jet Lite & Jet Konnect, both low-cost airlines, down to two. It was mentioned in the reports that the brand to be killed was Jet Lite, and if the plan goes through, Jet Lite’s operations would be run under the brand Jet Airways Konnect. Let us see the merit in this decision.

The first point here is the issue of brand consolidation. Jet had been operating two similar, low cost services under two different brand names, Jet Airways Konnect & Jet Lite for quite some time now. Both of them offer similar low cost no-frill air travel.

Jet Lite was created after Jet Airways realized the need for a low cost carrier and consequently, took over Air Sahara. The assets of Air Sahara have since been used under the brand Jet Lite. Soon after the take-over, there were some legal hassles regarding the deal. Then during the slowdown, when air travel demand reduced drastically, and the flights were operating with abysmally low seat utilization, Jet Airways wanted to shift some aircraft to its low fare operation. However, due to the legal hassles with Jet Lite, it could not do so. Thus, they decided to come up with another brand Jet Airways Konnect, and started operating a total of three brands.

It obviously does not make much sense spending for two brands when they offer more or less, the same value to the customer. Further, multiplicity of brands & sub-brands mostly leads to confusion among the customer. Thus, the decision to consolidate the brands makes total sense.

If it indeed decides one of the two brands must be killed, let us see which one it should be.

Jet Lite has created a distinct position for itself in the mind of customers. Customers realize that Jet Lite is a low cost carrier from Jet Airways. Jet Lite’s brand elements do a successful job in driving home the point, “different, yet same” while communicating its relationship to Jet Airways.

The first thing is the name itself. Further, it bears a slightly modified Jet Airways logo, with significantly different crew uniforms and interiors. All these factors combine to promise the customer the quality levels & trust of Jet Airways, but in a no-frill environment.

On the other hand, Jet Airways Konnect uses nearly the same imagery everywhere, with exactly same crew uniforms and other elements visible to the customer.

Because of the high similarity with its parent brand, there have been cases of passengers purchasing Jet Airways Konnect ticket when they intended to buy a Jet Airways ticket. This has often led to cases of unhappiness among the customers flying Jet Airways Konnect over the lack of service they were expecting from a Jet Airways flight.

When a brand tries to exist in different segments, especially when one of them is inferior to the other in terms of the total value offered, there should be a distinct difference in the two brands for people to not confuse between the two. There are many examples of companies launching a new brand altogether when they try to come up with more premium, or less premium products. For instance, Toyota has always been a popular brand for small cars. But when they wanted to enter the luxury car market, they chose to launch a new brand Lexus. This phenomenon is all the more popular in the FMCG space.

(The writer is a PGDM (2011) student at IIM Calcutta)