Silverjet Case Study

Sliverjet was a British airline company established as a business only service based in Luton airport in 2004 by Lawrence Hunt. Before the launch of the flights he secured sufficient funding to start trading in AIM (London Stock Exchange) in 2006. The company has achieved great successes until a report written by Huxley after the increase in fuel prices about the future of all-business class airlines companies, the report caused great concern for customers and travel agencies; this affected all business class companies including Sliverjet. In May 2008, trying to secure more funds to improve the company’s financial situation; the company borrowed a loan from Viceroy Holdings a Middle Eastern investor, However, the company could not secure the amount of money that they needed urgently to save the company’s future. The company’s shares were suspended later in 2008 and it suspended its operations and the company later went into liquidation.

In the following paragraphs, I will be examining the main reasons led to the failure of Sliverjet.

The segmentation of airlines passengers’ market based on the use of several variables (demographic, geographic, lifestyle...etc). Some of the variables used are, what is the purpose of passenger journey, how far their destination is, the duration of the journey and their country or culture of origin. Each of these variables has its importance in the aviation marketing.
The airlines generically used undifferentiated strategy; they treat all customers as the same with firms not making any specific effort to satisfy particular groups. I believe that if the airline companies want to succeed, they should target economy and business passengers at the same time, as the big companies do, they operate a mixture of both offered on most of their flights, for example easy jet, Virgin Blue and jet blue each started with specialist focus on the economy segment, but are now devoting increasing proportion of their planes to business-class seats