This book describes the principles of marketing in the airline industry from basic strategy, pricing, CRM, distribution to brands and advertisement. Shaw concentrates on the general principles of the airline industry. The author's approach is formal, he discusses each marketing task chapter by chapter, but his writing style is engaging and it is always interesting - at least for people who are not insiders. This approach has many advantages. Its formal structure makes it easy for the novice reader to navigate through the book and recall what one has learned. The writing is concise and theoretically sound. This book presents no anecdotes and irrelevant story telling, no exceptional success stories or failures that cannot be generalized. For instance, he describes Southwest Airlines as a very successful low cost strategy that has been successfully copied throughout the world by other low cost airlines. This strategy works because of the cost characteristics, the barriers to entry in the airline industry and the problems of traditional national carriers to copy a similar strategy. Other more idiosyncratic characteristics of Southwest (`relational coordination') are omitted here, because their impact on the airline's success is not theoretically clear. This is the difference between a scholarly approach and a typical business book.
This and the clear structure and writing style make this book ideal as teaching material. It can be used as an extensive case study or each chapter can be used individually as an application of the textbook marketing lessons to the airline industry. You'll find a lot of the basic textbook concepts in this book such as the Porter model, the Boston matrix and the Ansoff matrix, etc. Another advantage is that the book covers the world market and not only one part of the world. I often come across books that claim to explain "The XY industry" yet discuss exclusively the situation in the US market. On the downside: Shaw does not go beyond these simple models and it never gets quantitative. For instance there is no quantitative model for fare pricing. In general, there is little quantitative data presented, although the two tables about the cost structure of an airline included are especially interesting. A clear disadvantage is the almost total lack of literature references and further readings. Shaw expresses clearly his own ideas but he never mentions that other writers might have different views on a particular issue.
Overall, this book is a good example for an informative description of an industry. Other authors who want to write about a specific industry should use this as a kind of blueprint. Too many typos for a 5th edition though.
