Sascha Mayer - Ryanair and its low cost flights in Europe: Marketing Plan

The purpose of this report is to provide a Marketing Plan for Ryanair, which is developed to strengthen the companys position in the market. It is precisely tailored to the companys actual organizational situation and its market environment.

The report deals with analyses of Ryanair Holdings plc and its core business low cost flights with regards to get a status of its performance and the actual market situation in order to develop a suitable and successful marketing strategy, including its corresponding implementation, evaluation and control measures.

Ryanair offers low cost passenger flights within Europe. The airline serves short haul, point-to-point routes between Ireland, the UK and Continental Europe. Our idea is it to keep the product as simple as possible. Passengers travel ticketless without any frills in one class without any seat it is simple air transportation from A to B.

The external environment in Europe favors Ryanair and the entire low-cost airline market with an air traffic growth of up to 20%. In this connection, Ryanair is the pioneer in Europe and pursuing this business model in its pure form. Regarding the competitive environment Ryanair - with a clear strategy and structure - gains in importance and already became the market leader in the intra-European low-cost airline market closed-packed with Easyjet and followed by Air Berlin. With its 35 Mio passengers in 2006 and an excellent profitability on a high level of 20% is growing healthy and shows strong financial reserves of more than 2 billion.

Our customer is anyone within Europe in the age between 15 and 64, who wants to save money and still be able to travel by air to attractive destinations. This awareness of different passenger types requires marketing campaigns that cover all categories of potential customers. With this in mind we developed a Marketing Plan with specific tactical marketing activities.

We have ambitious goals and objectives for further growth and market penetration in Europe within a time frame of 6 years till 2012. On the one hand we plan to raise the market share within the low cost sector up to 40%. With our growing fleet of 200 airplanes in 2012, we want to double our annual passenger transportation to 80 million by then. On the other side we plan to eliminate the rest of our costly call centers and base the distribution only on online booking.

These concrete plans base on a realistic financial plan (see Profit Statement). The included best and worst case scenarios illustrate clearly that with implementing and executing all activities properly, the airline can quadruple its annual profit up to 1,230 billion in 2012.

With our planned tactical activities and our marketing budget of 20m we spend most of our marketing budget in advertising (60%) and sales promotion (pull strategy), and in public relations (30%), in order to expand the market by raising the customers awareness of our unbeatable price and our new eco-friendly fleet. A smaller part (10% = 2m) flows into a direct mailing campaign to attract price-conscious business travelers even more.

Ryanair will review the marketing plan every month to assess progress and alterations as the business progresses. Therefore this Marketing Plan is also providing certain counter measures, which has to be undertaken as recommended.