JetBlue Customers: Are You Experienced?

JetBlue not only offered $10 flights yesterday in honor of its 10th anniversary – it also launched a "digital brand experience" that aims to communicate the essence of its brand just by clicking on experience.jetblue.com.

It's a little reminiscent of HBO's Webby-award winning HBO Imagine digital brand showcase, except HBO employed actors and a 360-degree format to highlight its strengths in scripted, narrative storytelling.

JetBlue's site puts the focus on customers, with four fans telling their stories in response to JetBlue's call-out on YouTube (above), Facebook and the brand's other marketing channels.

The chosen customers highlight their favorite amenities or airline features, such as space, time, play, treat, leather seats, DirecTV, “Shut-Eye Service” on transcontinental flights, the Dunkin Donuts, and those ubiquitous free Terra Blues potato chips.

“Customers who fly JetBlue appreciate it," JetBlue director of marketing Michael Stromer told the New York Times. "We’re in a world where people do not trust what companies have to say about themselves, but they trust what other people tell them.”

The experiential marketing campaign, crafted by Firstborn in New York, was shot at its showpiece home base in New York, the JetBlue terminal at JFK.

The Social Media Influence blog was surprised that so few customers were highlighted, and that it's not being integrated into JetBlue's other touchpoints with consumers: "Our only concern is that the airline only has four actual customers talking and doesn’t seem to be involving the rest of us into the campaign."

We’ll have to take these customers' word about their JetBlue experience as being authentic. Airline advertising has been a slippery slope for the past several years, and marketing C2C seems a wise choice for JetBlue – dare we say, a true-blue choice?