Guest Post: Virgin America safety video is worth watching

Congrats to Rohit on the new addition here’s my humble addition to his guest post collection. This is a cross posting from experiencecurve so I apologize if you have already seen it. The key thing that I think is highlighted here is how much of a difference you can make to a customers experience by dramatically improving the unexpected, the un-asked for. I think it would be a rare airline customer focus group that actually complained about the safety video, because everyone already accepted the fact that they were boring, so what an amazing difference it is to have something fun, humorous, down to earth, dare I say human. I wrote about my Virgin America experience a couple of weeks ago and the one thing I searched for was the safety video, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Well Chet Gulland at their agency Anomaly just put it on youtube and sent me a link so here’s the update. Airline safety videos generally make me want to poke needles in my eyes, so it’s refreshing when a company tries to do one a little bit differently, and tries to make it a bit more bearable.

The message that they manage to get across here of course is "if we tried harder to make this video bearable imagine what we’ll do to improve the rest of the experience".

The interesting thing about this as well is that i’m sure no one has ever complained about the safety announcements, most customers have probably accepted that they have to be boring and mundane. What Virgin has done here is make something better that you never expected, and that is even better than improving things that everyone already knows need improving. The other side effect of this amusing video is everyone actually watched it and who knows maybe even remembered where the life jacket is.