Our cover story - Lufthansa

Our cover story - Lufthansa

We mentioned our on-going focus on the aviation industry and environmentalissues in our editorial, and so it seemed appropriate to devote the cover of thisissue to a really novel recycling (and marketing) initiative from Lufthansa.

By creating the ‘Upcycling collection’, the airline has turned discarded materialsfrom an old A340 into lifestyle products.

But we’ve also featured Lufthansa on the cover for a second reason, namelybecause of a project it’s launched with four major YouTubers to promote theairline’s in-flight shopping range.

To take each of these initiatives in turn:

The Lufthansa Upcycling Collection

As the video at the top of the article explains, following Lufthansa’s 2018 rebrand, there were a lot of items left that still had the old branding on them. At the same time, Lufthansa has been retiring aircraft from its fleet, for example the A340.

When Lufthansa removed one of its A340s to the aircraft graveyard in Teruel, Spain, Lufthansa hit on the solution of salvaging as many parts of the aircraft as possible and turning them into saleable items, so that anyone could buy a piece of Lufthansa history for themselves.

Lufthansa says that Hilke Siebecker and Christiana von Dewitz, product managers at Lufthansa WorldShop, went to Teruel to see what could be reused from the aircraft.

They were accompanied by representatives from German manufacturing and design companies such as Wilco Design (which manufactures couch tables and wall-mounted bars made from aircraft materials) and Aviationtag (which makes key fobs from parts of an aircraft’s aluminium shell.)

Aviationtag aimed to fashion 35,000 key fobs or key chains from the aircraft aluminium (with sections containing the logo being particularly valuable), while Wilco Design’s idea was to turn the window panels into wall mounted bars.

As well as turning the aircraft frame into furniture and keychains, parts of the interior of the A340 have been recreated as lifestyle items.

Here Lufthansa again worked with a number of companies, such as Jost Design, which has used the business class blanket as the basis for rucksacks and placed parts of the safety card at the bottom of wash bags.

Lufthansa is of course not the first aviation company to create a shopping range made out of recycled products, for example, Delta has turned old uniforms into backpacks, passport covers and travel kits.

Meanwhile Airbus has a dedicated Instagram channel, ‘a piece of the sky’, showing how an Airbus team is turning old aircraft parts into furniture and art.

However Lufthansa’s project stands out for the scale (it combines both lifestyle items and furniture), and the way it has told the story behind the initiative through online videos and articles.

It sends an environmental message, works as a marketing tactic, the items are high end and reinforce Lufthansa’s ethos as a premium brand, and they appear to be in high demand with many of the furniture items already having sold out.

However, we also chose Lufthansa for the September cover because of a second campaign. One where YouTubers have been creating content around Lufthansa’s in-flight shopping range.

Lufthansa - YouTubers review products

A large number of airlines now work with so-called ‘influencers’, including Lufthansa. The airline has recruited a group of YouTube experts to review products from the airline’s pre-flight shopping range (which as the name says, you reserve before you fly).

These include beauty vlogger Fleur de Force, tech YouTuber Mrwhosetheboss, watch expert Teddy Baldassarre, and the YouTube couple which produces the ‘Endless Adventure’ travel channel.

Each of the four have recorded a video about some of the products on offer, related to their individual area of expertise.

For example ‘Mrwhosetheboss’ looks at a pair of wireless earphones, a pair of over ear noise cancelling headphones (from Bose), a global portable WiFi hotspot unit, and a portable data storage device - all items a global traveller will obviously be interested in.

Lufthansa picked some really major YouTubers to work on this project. Mrwhosetheboss is the UK’s biggest technology YouTuber, while Fleur de Force has over a million channel subscribers.

Watch expert Teddy Baldassarre’s following of just over100k subscribers would be impressive in any other circumstances, but here it looks relatively modest by comparison (watch videos are of course fairly niche).

As a result, we can only assume that Lufthansa put quite a sizeable budget into commissioning all four to produce these shopping reviews.

This is a good piece of activity to bring Lufthansa’s shopping products to life, even though these are more like advertorials rather than reviews in the standard sense, as the YouTubers aren’t going to criticise a product in the Lufthansa range.

Looking at Mrwhosetheboss’s video, the closest he gets to saying anything remotely negative is to call the Bose headphones ‘not cheap’, which isn’t a surprise given the brand, and is something any knowledgeable Bose customer would already have factored in.

Focus on credibility and content, not vanity metrics

We mentioned the fact that all four have large followings, but for usthat’s not the biggest reason why this tactic works.

Vanity metrics (follower numbers) and even engagement levels are easy to fake. See our July editorial on the subject.

Yes, numbers matter to some extent, but for us the main focus should always be on credibility and content. So, beyond the numbers, are the people you are working with credible?

The answer here is quite obviously yes, they have a long track record of producing videos, they are experts in their field, and they have a fan community which values their recommendations.

And related to that, are they producing quality content where they tell your story in a new and different way?

Again, when watching the videos the answer here is that they do an effective job in taking items from Lufthansa’s shopping range and adding some colour to them - as well as giving consumers reasons to buy.

In addition to currently being on the Lufthansa shopping website,these video reviews will be appearing on the airline’s IFE system fromNovember 1st.