The United Continental Merging

United Airlines and Continental Airlines announced a stock-swap deal in May of 2010, under the name United Continental Holdings. This propelled them to new heights, making them the world’s largest airline (Koenig, 2010). This presents a number of challenges to marketers, in both United Airlines and Continental Airlines and ultimately, to United Continental Holdings.

United Continental Holdings will bear the United Airline name and hometown and run by Continental’s CEO. The new airline is set to begin merger operations in 2010 with a single operating certificate in 2011(Koenig, 2010).

There has been a negative response to the painting of three Continental airplanes with United colors from employees, frequent passengers and fans some whom placed critical post on social networking sites. This has resulted in the management remedying this through ceasing on all subsequent repainting schedules (Koenig, 2010).

The United Continental merger is an interesting and developing merger largely due to its complexity, vastness and far reaching effects to the two companies and consumers of their services. I intend to use this projected and un projected eventualities as a basis of my research on how, I, as a marketer can respond to challenges that will affect management’s decision making processes in mergers and effectively manage them before and if they do occur. This will ensure the efficient and effective integration of merging entities into a single entity through the turbulence of such a merger.

Being a high profile merger, I intend to apply scholarly/peer reviewed journals and questionnaires to employees, regular passengers, and fan’s of both airlines, peers and the public at large on their views on this merger. These will form a basis for my information gathering techniques and use the same through out the course for this topic.

Reference

Koenig, D. (2010). “Sources: Continental, United expected to merge.” Associated Press. Retrieved 23^rd January 2011 from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36857857/ns/business-us_business/