New Aircraft Interior to Improve Customer Service?

From an academic perspective, marketing of services can be broken down into what is referred to as the 7 "P's", which builds on the traditional 4 P's of marketing. I'll cover these in further depth at a later stage, but the 7 P's are described as:
Product
Price
Promotion
Place
People
Process
Physical Evidence

Physical evidence is sometimes a major tool that can be used to demonstrate how well an organisation delivers customer service, especially since many services may not (usually) have a tangible "widget" to demonstrate to a customer. Many companies then need to rely on physical evidence to demonstrate that they provide excellent service.

Today I was reading this article on United Airlines. The airline found that passengers in refurbished aircraft gave higher customer satisfaction results than customers in non-refurbished aircraft. As such, they have a major program underway to refurbish all their aircraft.

This highlights to me the importance of perception to the customer. Newly refurbished planes (and for other businesses consider their office, website, staff uniforms, vehicles etc.) create a perception to the client that they are travelling on a new plane and therefore getting a higher standard of service - even though it is essentially the same service as any other flight.