Paper Plane by Joon

Paper Plane by Joon

Joon, Air Frances’s youth inspired airline (or, if you share Gizmodo’s point of view - a “ridiculous airline for millenials”), has come up with what it calls a new way to offer “pooled gifts.”

Air France says that it is possible for a group of people to offer someone an “exceptional, surprising and personalized gift in just three clicks.”

Basically, you and a group of friends get together and share a link that serves as a kitty. Everyone adds money into the kitty, in which there is a deadline to contribute. Once the time is up, you give a Joon paper plane with the amount of money raised, to the lucky recipient, on which there’s also a personalised message.

The person getting the paper plane then has a year to redeem it on Joon flights.

Air France says by adding a personalised message onto the plane, “you don’t have to spend time chasing signatures all night long”, so in other words it saves you passing a card around.

That shows what Air France thought of when it came up with the paper plane idea. This is an alternative to things such as the office leaving present. When someone leaves a job, there is often a lot of head scratching about what to get them, as well as the last minute dash to hand around the card and write something funny inside.

Paper Plane takes away that headache, and just about everyone likes being given flights (or a flight voucher) as a present. Other occasions where Paper Plane could be used includes birthdays where different family members chip in, or indeed as wedding presents.

Pooled Gift Ideas From Air Canada and Virgin Atlantic

It’s a good idea, but also similar to pooled gift ideas from a number of airlines.

In 2016, Air Canada launched its ‘Embarq’ programme, the aim of which was to help “cash-strapped” millennials go on a honeymoon, business trip or adventure by collecting small donations from friends, family, and even total strangers – which the participant received as an Air Canada e-gift card.

Meanwhile at the end of last year, Virgin Atlantic ran a “Where I want for Christmas” initiative, which encourages Brits to ask friends and family members for contributions towards flights and holidays instead of unwanted Christmas presents.

However in fairness, both these campaigns worked slightly differently to the Joon one, in that the eventual recipient decided where s/he wanted to go and asked friends and families for donations and present money.

The Joon idea works the other way around, groups of friends or relatives initiate the group gift and the “paper plane” (or flight voucher to call it what it really is) can be used anywhere on the Joon network.

Social Airline Not Very Social?

When looking at the Joon Paperplane campaign, we tried to find posts on Joon’s Facebook page to tell us more about it.

To our surprise, it looks as if Joon has only posted twice on Facebook in 2018, which is strange for an airline that sold itself as being modern and youthful.

Sure, Facebook is losing popularity among younger consumers, but it is still the world’s largest social network, and something no airline can afford to ignore. Joon’s Instagram and Twitter activity is somewhat more active, though there seem to be gaps, especially during the latter part of May.

Key Take-Away

SimpliFlying CEO Shashank Nigam devoted his June 7th SimpliLive show to Joon. In it, he called Joon “as confused as an airline brand can get” in that it seems to be centred on tactical stunts and gimmicks and not strategy.

Paperplane falls into that category, it’s a nice idea, but there’s little to underpin it. There is no support for the idea on Joon’s channels. As Shashank Nigam said in his video, “marketing is consistency”, and it’s lacking here.