Skift Take
Coming up with fresh ideas in aviation takes guts. Sometimes your guts are cut out, and handed back to you on a nicely compartmentalized in-flight meal tray. But there's no stopping some people.
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Disruption is booming in the travel industry, with one notable exception: Air travel.
Many would say, and have said, that air travel is broken, but can it be fixed? Can we tear it up and start fresh?
Those are dangerous, blasphemous questions to ask, even if you’ve been helping the aviation industry imagine, design, and deliver a better self, practically from the beginning.
At the Airline Passenger Experience Association Expo in Portland this week, Teague’s Principal Brand Strategist, Devin Liddell, presented an alternative, disrupted future for aviation: Poppi.
To be mild, Poppi was not universally welcome.
That’s because, at its heart, Poppi is a high-concept airline. It is a disruption of today’s airline service which pivots on a consumer-centric brand definition. It aims to resolve common pain points of travel, and to introduce alternative services and revenue sources for airlines. It aims for a win-win that allows airlines to operate profitably—though quite differently—and to give passengers something to look forward to when they take to the skies—something unexpected.
It’s optimistic. It’s hopeful. It’s daring. That’s why the pitchforks are out, and the fires are stoked. A concept like Poppi, some say, must die before it can make trouble.
We asked Liddell, who works with a number of consumer brands and technology companies, as well as in aviation, why the airline industry is so resistant to change, whether that can be fixed, and what it would mean to anyone wanting to fly in the future if it isn’t.
The Mockingjay Airline
Without some disruption, as Liddell sees it, the future of aviation hangs in the balance somewhere between Big Brother and the Hunger Games, tipping on the edge of grim beige-grey commoditization. Poppi, he explains, is Teague’s Mockingjay, a call to action whistled as a gift to the industry, hoping for an echo.
“I totally reject it, but there is a dystopian potential where [aviation] will all devolve into a fully commoditized good,” Liddell says. “The utopian version of tha
