benchmark report
airline marketing
social
love is in the air
face of swiss SWISS SWISS celebrated the delivery of its first 777-300 with a special “Faces of SWISS” livery depicting over 2,500 of its employees from all around the world. The faces represent SWISS team members from all depar tments which, together, form the Swiss airlines team : crew, maintenance, ground staff, administrative, logistics, and management. To show that all employees are equally impor tant at SWISS, the size of each face was not tied to rank. The twelve larger faces painted on the livery were chosen at random, from among the worldwide team. The job of photographing all 2500 employees star ted in November and finished in early February, with the faces being placed on 450 sqm of 0.05mm thick foil, weighing 50kg to create the specially printed livery. The aircraft itself has been used for promotional purposes on longMAR 2016 ISSUE
VIRGIN ATLANTIC AND SCOOT haul routes. For example, when landing at New York’s JFK Airpor t for the first time, the airline organised an event where passengers were entertained by a traditional Swiss Alphorn performance. Over the past few years, a number of airlines have featured faces on liveries. For example, Norwegian has maintained a tradition of featuring the faces of prominent Scandinavians, who have left their mark in history, on its aircraft tails. Ryanair enjoyed a very enthusiastic response from fans to its 30th anniversary livery featuring faces of customers who par ticipated in a special competition. However, SWISS’s take on the genre is slightly different on representative livery, and more personal, because it focuses on the people who, every day, in ways both large and small, make the airline brand what it is.
Holidays are always a great excuse for airline marketing teams to get creative and show passengers their fun side. This February, both Virgin Atlantic and Singaporean lowcost carrier, Scoot, showed their fans some Valentine’s Day love – each in their own special way. In a social experiment, Virgin Atlantic sought to find true love stories that were inspired or helped-along by travel. Between February 12th and 14th, the airline asked social media fans on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter a series of questions, such as “Where did you meet your loved one?” and “Have you ever travelled long distances for love?” They then engaged with respondents who tweeted replies using the hashtag #loveisintheair, and even turned some of the best responses into memes. According to Virgin, the initiative was inspired by founder Sir Richard Branson,
who hired a plane after being bumped from a flight on the way to see his future – thus beginning the airline! wife Alternately, in an experiential Valentine’s day salute, Scoot Airlines opted to surprise a plane full of passengers with a musical delight and surprise photo-op. In the middle of a Melbourne to Singapore flight on February 14, cabin crew switched on bright rainbow cabin lights and began to play the song Lovefool by the Cardigans. Flight attendants then went around the plane with tons of fun love props and took photos of all the Valentine’s couples onboard. Scoot’s random inflight fun caught the attention of both masahble.com and the Daily Mail among others. Both Valentine’s Day projects show that you don’t need a huge budget to have fun with customers.
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EXPERIENTIAL SOCIAL DIGITAL TV, PRINT, OOH
