I guess in your free country everybody is free to do what they want. Where do you live so I can come over and replace my stolen items with your stuff while you stir your shit?

I agree with you. I hope they go under and save us all headaches in the long run.

The true insult is the treatment by their employees who do not have a clue about customer service. They did not apologize nor try to book me on the next flight – it was ‘my problem’. I hope this airline has a quick demise as only one-time passengers cannot sustain it! The ads are the lest of their problems.

Good point, but I guess you have to consider whether this communication style is really helping them in the long term. They’ve been losing money for some time, but they only lost $3.8 million in 2007 (on revenue of $761.6 million) as opposed to 2006, when they lost $79 million (on revenue of $540.3 million), so at least they’re trending up.

Yes, it’s important to define what your brand ISN’T, but it’s also important not to turn off existing customers while you do it. Besides, does it really make a person an “uptight,” “fearful,” or “repressed” — or NOT “free-thinking” and “light-hearted” — if they find shock value like this to be just plain stupid?

It strikes me that, out of the comments in this thread so far*, half of the men and three quarters of the women seem to find this email either stupid, cringe-inducing, or both. (*Not counting “brad” because I find it hard to believe that anyone who didn’t work for Spirit Air would comment anonymously and brag about the fact that “their load factor is up over 85 percent” [insert threesome joke here] or posture as though this blog post or the people commenting on it were indicting the entire U.S. airline industry.)

Is anyone actually offended by this “threesome” message? I’m not quite sure, but it definitely made a lasting — and in many cases negative — brand impression. (It’s made an impression on the search engines, too, apparently; this post is often listed right under SpiritAir.com when you Google “spirit air”. Talk about viral marketing!)

There must not be as many uptight, fearful Americans out there as we thought if Spirit Airlines did their homework and figured the larger slice of the pie was appealing to the free-thinking, llight-hearted market.

Agree or disagree, I bet both sides opened the email just lke all of us in this thread.

Ba ROCK ON!

This should be their new slogan: “Come fly with Spirit Airlines, the Whores of Aviation. We can’t get you to fly with us because of our good service, so we’ll try anything else.”

And suddenly, only two things remained:
- The ad agency is run by a bunch of 17 year old males who are good at lying to clueless leadership.
- These people are just kinda slimy in their attempts to get attention.

Then I saw the MILF link to the ABC article and only one thing remained:

- These people are just kinda slimy in their attempts to get attention and their senior management are not above lying to perpetuate the “ha,ha, oops.” to continue to get publicity.

Is it working? I dunno. Would I be in their target demographic? Not by a long shot.

But mostly I’m just disappointed they chose a name like “Spirit Air” to then come off looking like creepy Uncle Skeeve who just embarrasses everyone.

Point taken. I know some guys who do think threesomes are fun, but I have talked with many others who are offended by the thought. I didn’t mean to “stereotype.”

Just as all women don’t think alike, all men don’t think alike either. I sometimes wonder if men are even more stereotyped than women.

Holly

Sounds like a stereotype to me. I was pretty shocked at the email. I think it’s distasteful.

Personally I find cheekiness a bit unprofessional. I like class not crass.

Maybe the Spirit execs should read your post about the differences between what men and women find funny in advertising.

They encourage you to “come join in the fun” of a threesome. I’m not sure women think of “threesomes” as fun like men do. I have several female friends who have been pressured by their boyfriends/husbands to join in a threesome and in one case it ended with the disolving of the relationship.

Now, if they wanted to get women excited about this “threesome” idea- they could have an image of a woman with two guys – one rubbing her feet, another feeding her strawberries. Now THAT would be fun.

But that’s just one woman’s perspective.