Company Overview
Based in Auckland, New Zealand, Air New Zealand is the country’s national airline, operating flights to domestic and international destinations. Its route network focuses on Australasia and the South Pacific, with long-haul services to Asia Europe and North America. The airline has a presence on social media, although a total of 677,000 Likes indicates that its Facebook presence lags behind others in its sector.
Challenge
High fuel costs, heavy taxes and planes that must fly whether they are full or not make for a low margin air travel industry.
In Australia, the biggest air battle is over the trans-Tasman route, the industry lingo for flights between Australia and New Zealand.
To claim its share of passengers flying the route, Air New Zealand operates frequent retail sales, averaging at one sale every three weeks.
The particular challenge for Air New Zealand within this highly competitive industry is running effective sales when challenger brands are noting and matching its offers, typically within 24 hours.
Within a 12-week window, Air New Zealand set itself an ambitious goal: to develop a campaign that would cut through and drive sales, without relying on a price advantage message.
While an uplift in revenue would be the primary business measure of success, the airline also wanted to improve its brand health metrics – getting people to shift their perceptions of the both the airline and the destination (New Zealand).
Strategy
Two strategic research insights informed Air NZ’s content strategy. The first break through was unearthed by in-house research that identified that while 5.3m Australians consider visiting NZ in the next year, only one in five of them end up going. Other destinations like Bali, Europe and US are perceived as more progressive, exotic and interesting. Yet of Australians who do visit NZ, most (99%) love it and would recommend the trip to friends (source: NZ Ministry of Economic Development).
Air NZ needed to showcase the fresh, progressive side of NZ that people only tend to discover when they visit the counntry. A traditional marketing campaign telling people they would enjoy NZ didn’t feel right, so the airline opted for content instead to truly shift perceptions among even the biggest NZ rejecters.
The creative idea was ‘The Kiwi Sceptics’, four six-minute digital content episodes documenting attempts to convert four NZ-hating Aussies into New Zealand advocates. Enlisting expert NZ guides, The Sceptics were slowly turned into Air New Zealand’s ambassadors, preaching about their newfound love of all things Kiwi via an online hub.
To attract a wider audience to its content, print and banner ads were created and the ‘Dob in a Sceptic’ social media campaign drove sharing. Content was also pushed out in cinema ads and via YouTube.
Results
The Kiwi Sceptics episodes were viewed over 900,000 times in total and delivered AUD$250,000 (£145,000) in earned media. The campaign generated a 60% increase in Air New Zealand’s Facebook community (and took them to prime position for Facebook engagement in their category).
While actual revenue figures remain sensitive, Air New Zealand can reveal that during The Kiwi Sceptics, the airline delivered its most effective incremental retail sales ever. Analysis shows that every dollar spent on the campaign returned AUD$6.30 in revenue.
Over and above sales, the content-centred activity had several positive effects, surpassing expectations in shifting attitudes and perceptions.
Some 12% more people now believe NZ offers a “variety of experiences”, while 6% more people now perceive NZ as a “progressive and interesting country”, that it is “ a great destination for dining out” with a “great nightlife and bar scene” (source: TNS research)
BlogStar’s Final Thought:
Air New Zealand’s campaign marks a brave shift from traditional ‘push’ advertising to a digital content-led and consumer-centric campaign. Its success reveals how effective content can be at shifting long-held perceptions among consumers, as well as driving hard sales.
Moreover, this case study demonstrates the potential longevity of content for Air New Zealand; people who viewed The Kiwi Sceptics are now being re-targeted in subsequent retail campaigns, confirming that investing in great content marketing can provide a useful acquisition channel for future activity.
Photo: Charaka Ranasinghe
