Ryanair’s Killer Ap?

Breathlessly then, mes anges, to Ryanair, those unrivaled masters of the ‘screw you’ school of marketing, and their latest charm offensive. And by ‘charm offensive’ I mean, of course, all the latter and none of the former.

By now you will likely have had your day interrupted by reports of Ryanair’s recent – how to say? – unfortunate encounter with the blogosphere. It pains me too much to go into the sordid details here; I can only bear so much bad grammar for a start.  Suffice it to say a blogger noted a security problem on Ryanair’s website and, no more able to not do so than the sun rising, blogged about it.  A Ryanair staffer, equally hampered by what we might call occupational determinism, wrote something rather rude and nasty in return. This, inevitably, upset ‘the blogosphere’ which, of late, has become rather more used to brands in similar situations humbly thanking them for pointing out their errors and cheerfully fixing them and admitting fault. Ryanair, whose approach to customer relations is best described by a sort of mortified silence, has made it very clear that they do not give a hoot what bloggers think, furnishing us with this magnificent PR statement:

Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again. Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel

If Ryanair’s response sounds a little, ah, web 1.0 to you, then that’s because it is. And much condemnation has ensued regarding the brand’s inability to converse constructively via social media.

But that, I think, is to miss the point. What this latest ‘Ryanair PR disaster’ shows is not actually a PR disaster at all, but a manifestation of what we might call “Ryanair’s killer ap”: the fact that their product (flights) are so incredibly cheap, that no matter how unspeakably the brand acts publicly, people will still buy their product. Their business is built not on goodwill, but on cheapness, their’s and their customers’. Social media disasters such as this one are an irrelevancy.

In fact, I wonder if there might not be a category of brands, such as Ryanair, who have similar killer aps (market-dominating cheapness, for example, or a technological monopoly) who we would be able to describe as ‘Immune to Social Media’? Can anybody think of brands that might fit into this category? I’m thinking Aldi, Google, maybe large institutions like Universities… let’s have your suggestions in the comments, kids.