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Why "brand" Keeps Private Aviation Businesses Plateaued.

What Porsche and NetJets understand about perception.
Why trustworthy isn't enough to be magnetic.
Building brand associations that actually pull.

◆ What Porsche and NetJets understand about perception.

◆ Why trustworthy isn't enough to be magnetic.

◆ Building brand associations that actually pull.

What is brand?

People use the word brand constantly in BizAv, but most of the time they don't truly understand what it means or how important it is to building client relationships at scale.

Modern neuroscience has shown that the brain maps concepts through networks of relationships, meaning what we perceive by looking at something is a map of related attributes, experiences, and other concepts.

Take a piece of metal called a Porsche 911. By looking at it you immediately conceptualize it through a network of associations at different strengths, both around its role and identity. You'd likely associate it with some amount of "speedness", sleekness, a high amount of "car-ness", and that it's German. You might also associate identities around it, cool, sophisticated, or maybe your father had one so there's nostalgia. Everyone is going to have a slightly different list of attributes. But just looking at this piece of metal, you immediately relate it to many other concepts, and this sum is your perception of a Porsche 911.

This network of associations is how you conceptualize every individual object, person, or concept. Where a G800 has an even stronger speed association, but less of a car association. Importantly, there's nothing intrinsic about many of these attributes, they are all relative and based on past information. Two cars could be the exact same color, where depending on their shape, one color might be perceived as overly loud and one as fittingly bright and aggressive.

Your perception of a Porsche is a network of attributes based on past experiences of the world and how a piece of metal shaped like that has interacted with the rest of the world in your past. There are objective attributes like weight or top speed, but your perception of these is all just relative to a baseline formed over time. That perception is also shaped by how Porsche has deliberately positioned it over many years, and how other brands have positioned sports cars around it.

This is how your business gets conceptualized as well. The sum of perception and associations a person has with a business has a word: brand.

And importantly, how that person perceives it individually, not how you do or tell them to perceive it. Or as Bezos put it: "Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room."

The Two Types of Brand Associations.

Some traits are more functional selling points such as everything around the practical benefits of going with your business like safety, trustworthiness, speed.

But not all of people's desires are pragmatic. They also have deeper desires around identity that are just as strong if not stronger. Such as wanting to be perceived as good at business, successful, a good spouse/parent, or smart with money. If you can associate the right identities strongly around working with your business, that can make even people who have never done business with you still see you as the only option. This is an area many private aviation businesses struggling with growth have very underdeveloped.

HOW YOUR BRAND FORMS BEFORE YOU EVER SPEAK.

When someone has never heard of your business, your brand is a blank space. Then immediately upon seeing a post, your booth, your website, or any asset, before talking with you and before working with you, they start building most of the initial brand in their head.

Finding out you're a private aviation business immediately adds a lot of intrinsic properties: you're exclusive, luxury, streamlined, expensive, and almost a slight elevation above everyday life even for people who have flown privately many times.

The immediate look, color, and feel of your brand adds another layer which is quite a bit more important than most people in this industry give credit to. But this first impression is also more fragile, if the site looks low budget or poorly put together, it can immediately erode some of the positive associations you had before around luxury and feeling polished, and shift perception toward something more like safe and competent transportation on a business jet rather than an elevated and streamlined experience.

Every trait your business is perceived as associated with adds to the brand.

Why Surface-Level Brands Plateau.

To create a brand that truly gets people excited to work with you at scale, you have to go beyond the obvious, purely functional, or pragmatic attributes. This is the biggest factor small to mid-size businesses often don't understand, and what keeps them from getting past a certain point of growth.

Being perceived as diligent, safe, and trustworthy are all great, and they're a prerequisite for associating identities with your business. But they're not what gets people excited on their own. Kids wouldn't have posters of Porsches on their bedroom walls if they were nothing but trustworthy.

If your business is more on the B2B side this still applies, because even in B2B the decision maker is still a person, and people's emotional perception of a business shapes their confidence in it before any rational evaluation begins. McKinsey or Goldman Sachs are some of the most "stereotypical" B2B businesses, and yet have still built very strong identity and prestige around their brands.

When you look at the largest players across this industry like Gulfstream or NetJets, what do their brand materials have that most mid-size businesses don't? They're going beyond service-level positive perception and actually engineering the feeling they want prospective clients to feel when looking at their business. Pure integrity can take you pretty far, and it's always a huge prerequisite. But to really continue growth, deliberate brand development and more intentional positioning of how your business is perceived, and how that fits in with other businesses in the market, becomes necessary.

Building a brand That has real Pull.

Building these deeper pulls to your business also takes more than just bluntly saying this is how you want people to think of your business.

Take Apple's famous "Think Different" campaign. This is clearly going beyond basic brand associations like fast computers, or reliability. What this campaign is getting at is trying to associate Apple with an identity of innovators, and that if you at all want to be an innovator you need a Mac.

For deeper brand associations, you can't outright say "to be an innovator you need Apple". To create this association Apple needed to show their identity, where you then come to your own conclusion. For more objective traits a business can just outright say they have a good safety record or have the “world's fastest private jet" but the dynamics of building identity in business is similar to that of a person. You can't just say you're trustworthy or that if someone is going somewhere in life they should associate with you. You have to show them, or tell them indirectly. Think about the most successful messaging, slogans, or ads for luxury brands:

"Because You're Worth It."
"The Art of Excellence"
"Don't crack under pressure."

This type of identity building is a staple of almost every luxury or high end industry but you almost never see it in BizAv apart from the leaders of this space.

It's also worth noting that many more objective traits carry deeper identities when said right. Back to "the world's fastest private jet”, Bombardier's main point here isn't just the speed of the Global 8000. It's that when you fly on a Global 8000 you're at the top of what's possible in business aviation, and the people who fly on it are the kind of people for whom only that will do.

Most people in the BizAv industry are practical and very focused on the aviation itself. Which is great, but without having the brand side as well, many of these mid-size businesses eventually plateau.

Where to Start.

Building a brand that is truly magnetic may seem daunting, but all exceptional brands start from a few simple traits.

You have to decide the most crucial traits and identities your audience wants in this business. Then you decide what it genuinely takes to show and build those associations credibly. And you repeat them deliberately, across every touchpoint, over years. Brand at this level is what accumulates when the same impression keeps showing up in the right places long enough that it becomes the obvious conclusion.

Focus really is a virtue here. Another issue is many businesses in this industry try to be everything to everyone. If your core tenets are that you're cheap, premium, safe, careful, fast, trustworthy, extravagant, streamlined, luxury, and pragmatic, even beyond the contradictions in your identity, you don't come off as anything specific or memorable when you say you're everything. To have a stronger pull to the right people you have to push some people away.

This means that bringing in fewer unqualified inquiries, and being more attractive to ideal prospects is really one in the same. Even beyond explicit signals like pricing and whether you’re advertising empty legs or a 50-hour jet card, it should be immediately obvious to prospects just through business identity whether you're for them or not. I talk to charters all the time trying to position toward higher value clients but still many or most of their leads end up being price shoppers.

Take one of the top-end charters like Global Jet Luxembourg. It's immediately clear who this is for and who it’s not. Not through outright saying it or giving specific numbers, but subtly signaling a certain set of associations through every visual choice, line of copy, and touchpoint until the right prospect feels immediately at home and the wrong one self-selects out. Depending on where on this spectrum you want to position your business, that same accumulation happens across every touchpoint you control, whether deliberately or by default.

TakeAway.

The businesses that become genuinely synonymous with private aviation in a client's mind aren't the ones that just proved they were competent. They're the ones that made the client feel something specific every time they encountered them, consistently enough and credibly enough that it became the obvious conclusion.

Most mid-size businesses in this industry have the operational foundation and resources to support that kind of brand but just don’t yet have the coordination or awareness of how crucial it is to get to their next level.

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