Lufthansa-Say Yes To the world

FEATURED CAMPAIGN SAY YES TO THE WORLD - LUFTHANSA

Last month, our cover story was the Lufthansa rebrand, which will see Lufthansa (largely) getting rid of the yellow on its aircraft over the next seven years with the blue becoming much more prominent.

Though the rebrand has produced mixed reactions within the design and aviation communities, we applauded Lufthansa for the way it unveiled the new design and told the story behind it. This included a tour of aircraft with the new livery around Europe and an ‘Explore the New’ microsite.

The follow-on from ‘Explore the New’ is another campaign, created by German ad agency Kolle Rebbe, called ‘Say yes to the world.’

Our second featured campaign of the month, Lufthansa says that this is one of the biggest campaigns to be launched in its history.

FROM PRODUCT TO EXPERIENCE

Interestingly enough, Lufthansa’s agency says that the campaign changes the focus “from top-quality products to

unforgettable experiences.” That’s noteworthy as Lufthansa has only recently been admitted into the club of airlines who have been awarded five stars by Skytrax, which saw the airline stage a star themed ‘stellar tour’ campaign on social media in celebration (which we covered in the January edition).

However, according to Kolle Rebe, the emphasis is now on the airline “positioning itself as a partner to anyone who is open to trying new things and ready to view travelling as a rich source of inspiration within their lives at large.”

Lufthansa’s head of marketing communications Bettina Struve has reinforced this point by saying that: ““Say yes to the world” captures a cosmopolitan attitude and a passion for living life to the fullest in a single sentence. It expresses more than just an attitude though. It is a call to action, encouraging people to question their old habits and ways of thinking and be ready to jump feet first into new and exciting experiences.’”

On its own, this theme isn’t unique.

A number of airlines already orientate their brand strategy around it. For example, Russian airline S7 has adopted this approach for a number of years, as seen through a series of high impact campaigns such as ‘Imagine’ and ‘The Best Planet’.

Most recently, S7 encouraged people to leave behind the fakery of virtual reality and the digital world and go and experience the world for themselves in a campaign called ‘I am you’ (our campaign of the month for December).

Similarly, Turkish Airlines launched a campaign during the American Football Super Bowl fronted by US TV doctor, Dr Oz called ‘Five Senses.’

The rationale behind Five Senses sounds a lot like that behind ‘Say yes to the world’: “To discover the unknown, Turkish Airlines encourages their guests to explore their five senses to their fullest. At the end of this new journey, Turkish Airlines aims to inspire the whole world to seek new discoveries.”

A FOCUS ON THE HUMAN ELEMENT OF DISCOVERY

As a result, a good test when evaluating marketing campaigns is this:

If you took away the name of the brand running it, and slotted in a completely different brand name but otherwise left the mechanics and creative the same, would anyone be any wiser?

Bearing that in mind, how is Lufthansa is bringing ‘Say yes to the world’ to life?’ and making it different from other experience-led campaigns?

The answer seems to be a focus on experiences and the people who experience them.

So while Turkish Airlines ‘Five Senses’ and S7’s ‘The best planet’ looks at travel as a sensory experience with a single narrator (Dr Oz for Turkish Airlines and Cosmonaut Andrei Borisenko for S7), Lufthansa’s ‘Say Yes to the World’ draws upon individual people and individual stories.

In fact, you could argue that ‘Say Yes to the World’ is a continuum of the 2017 campaign, ‘Life Changing Places.’ where Lufthansa challenged travellers to find “which extraordinary place will change your life.”

While ‘Say Yes to the World’ has only just started, it is so far being articulated in the following ways:

1 - A short film and ad - Why do you love the world? This shows individuals as well as pairs of people sitting down on Lufthansa Premium Economy seats in different countries including the USA, Germany, China, Japan and India.

They are then asked a series of questions around ‘Why do you love the world.’

The participants, who include a couple who don’t know each other, a mother and daughter, and an African migrant in Germany; laugh, make observations on the beauty of life and get emotional as they reflect on the world and their experiences of it.

It’s a stirring piece of content that speaks to us as people and that you want to watch over and over.

2 - An augmented reality experience. Starting in Lufthansa’s main Frankfurt and Munich hubs, socalled ‘open seats’ are being installed as part of a tour, allowing people to experience other destinations.

As in the ‘Why do you love the world’ ad, the seats are Premium Economy ones.

According to Lufthansa, people taking part in the experience will find themselves ‘transported’ elsewhere and can witness everything from “a spontaneous jam session in New York to a kung fu lesson with Chinese Shaolin monks.”

Lufthansa says that a ‘world tour’ of the seats is planned with a stop in New York.

3 - A social media campaign using the #SayYesToTheWorld hashtag. On Instagram for example, Lufthansa has been posting short films with the ‘Why do you love the world’ question, as well as high impact destination photos.

However, rather than being your standard destination pictures of famous landmarks or locations, these pictures are not geo-tagged.

They instead focus on the people and the experience as opposed to the place - the location almost seems to be secondary.

4 - A Say Yes to the World website. This website takes the form of a spinning globe. Users are asked to place a pin anywhere in the world, and make a statement.

For example, placing a pin in Thailand brings up a series of statements where you are asked what you ‘say yes to’ - these statements include experiencing, listening, enjoying, feeling and discovering.

If you choose ‘listening to’ you are then presented with another series of statements such as ‘strange sounds’, ‘buskers in the street’ and ‘stories.’

After you’ve finally said ‘yes’ to one of those options your pin goes on the globe and you are invited to share your statement on social media.

Though a lot of people appear to have put pins in the map, this was to us one element that seemed to fall down a little in an otherwise excellent campaign.

First of all it seems to run counter to how people behave on social media.

Using the experiment we ran through, would someone really tweet out the statement, “I say YES to listening to strange sounds in Thailand, Thailand”? (in itself a glitch, given that we declined to choose ‘Bangkok’, so it repeated the country twice), to their social media friends and followers?

This is especially since the draft tweet we were presented with didn’t include a hashtag or any other kind of context, other than a link back to the site.

Or indeed, a question designed to get a response. For example, why not include a follow-on line of ‘what would you say yes to?’, or even a competition element ‘tell us what experience you say yes to, to win flights’

Secondly there was little follow through. So going back to our choice of ‘strange sounds in Thailand’:

HOW do we now listen to these strange sounds? Play us some strange sounds! What indeed is a ‘strange sound’? Who or what makes them?

It is true that on navigating the site further you can access a series of videos and images under select Lufthansa destinations, but as a user we felt we’d be left hanging at this point.

Other than the elements mentioned, Say Yes To the World will also feature in OOH advertising, in email newsletters and in the Lufthansa in-flight magazine.

KEY TAKE-AWAY

The Lufthansa campaign is effective for a number of reasons. Yes it leads on the experience of travel as other airline campaigns do, but Lufthansa’s campaign is person centred. What does it mean to you as a person to experience something new when you go abroad.

It both builds on the rebrand but is also a logical progression from earlier campaigns such as Life Changing Places. As a result, it fits in with what it has done before.

The use of social media images that aren’t recognisably about any one specific destination is particularly interesting.

Posting a series of pictures about (say) the Taj Mahal or the Great Wall of China is not only what everyone else does, it would also shift attention away from the overall message of the human and emotional dimension.

The one element which doesn’t work as well as it should is, as we’ve mentioned, the website. There is no real incentive for people to share or talk about it and no follow-through from getting people to choose experiences to letting them find out more about them. However, it is early days and the campaign is of course constantly evolving.