Entrepreneurs: The Forgotten Aviation Customer
The small entrepreneur may be the forgotten customer of the private aviation industry – give them a game that they can win playing by the rules and they will play it all day long.
Is it snowing because it is cold or is it cold because it is snowing?
Often we think about air travel as responding to a market for doing cool stuff on the ground. We don’t often think about how air travel can impact what cool stuff, how much cool stuff there is available, and the price of the cool stuff on the ground. This is what entrepreneurs do. Things like hotels and theme parks are put together much slower than airline routes, so we often confuse which caused the other to happen.
Less obvious is the possibility that an organized private aviation industry can impact markets, products, and pricing by increasing the available size of the market and the speed in which transactions can take place. Entrepreneurs will do the rest.
It’s only a matter of time…so give them time
Due to advances in technology real time pricing has become a maker or breaker in margin industries with a P&L threshold. These include old standards like airlines, hotels, tours, conferences, etc. But most powerfully, they can include the things that Entrepreneurs have not figured out yet.
In some markets events occur so fast that there is insufficient time to either set a fixed price or engage in lengthy negotiations. By the time you have all the information to determine a price, everything has changed. Ironically, people trade social currency in social media on a similar schedule. Time is more often than not the reaper of death or the bringer of prosperity on a market. But don’t worry about the fuzzy math; there is an entrepreneur for that.
The Gravity of Constraint
By comparison, in social media we see that Twitter imposes a constraint on message size to 140 characters at an astonishing effect on entrepreneurial activity. Ebay induces an expiration date on a market to remarkable effect on entrepreneurial growth and volume. Google imposes a “popularity contest” in a market with spectacular financial effect on entrepreneurial incentives. All these entrepreneurs have something in common – they are gaming the constraint on a system in order to dominate a market.
Private Aviation also has the power to manipulate the time constraint in a market for human experiences. Just give an entrepreneur the chance to game the constraints imposed on the true cost of money, time, social, popularity, and all the cool stuff to do on the ground.
As Seth Godin writes “Marketers of successful ideas rarely market the facts, instead, they market stories that match the worldview of the people being marketed to.” Again, that’s what entrepreneurs do best. Perhaps the Private Aviation Industry should share their view of the world…to the world of entrepreneurs.
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