JWT’s AnxietyIndex is designed as a place to discuss how brands and consumers are responding to the global recession. With daily content updates, AnxietyIndex.com includes contributions from around JWT’s network, offering a truly global perspective.
Royal JordanianAirlines has just launched a marketing initiative that’s not about free upgrades or price reductions. Its “Get to Know Your World” competition is simply about consumer engagement.
The mechanism is simple enough: Every Tuesday for eight weeks, Royal Jordanian is publishing ads featuring a photo of a well-known landmark. Contestants must enter the name of the corresponding city on the airline’s Web site. The prize: free tickets with Royal Jordanian to these very places.
The results: Royal Jordanian drives traffic to its site, gets consumers to interact with its brand, generates word-of-mouth and stimulates demand. In this recession-sensitive industry and in this part of the world, where brand-driven contests are not the norm, this effort is spot-on. Today’s prospective passengers are not being drawn in by bargains and promotions. Royal Jordanian is opting for a differentiating and less gimmicky approach, one that has greater potential to further brand loyalty. After all, when offers are comparable, the power of the brand can make all the difference.
No, the irony doesn’t escape me. As CEO of JWT, I’m now championing the work of one of our clients, JetBlue, which in its latest viral campaign pokes fun at stuffy, stodgy … CEOs. Specifically, it makes fun of CEO Carl Davis, who has to eschew his corporate jet and fly with “regular people.” But with JetBlue he finds that flying commercial is much like jetting—with leather seats, personal entertainment options and excellent customer care included.
As one blog commenter noted, the campaign’s levity is a dicey proposition now that cynicism toward CEO types is real and is at an all-time high. But a little humor can serve as a much-needed mental break for customers. And it works perfectly with JetBlue’s distinctly un-stuffy, anti-stodgy airline brand.
And for those seeking assurance along with humor, the airline has extended the JetBlue Promise Program—which offers full refunds to customers who lose full-time jobs before a trip they’ve booked—to include Getaways vacation packages. Instilling confidence in consumers during these anxious times makes good business sense.
Every crisis is, by definition, a crisis of meaning, a deep transformation of the meanings through which we see the world. The challenge for those who work with brands: How can we identify these new meanings to create a more powerful and timely discourse for our brands?
Several years ago, JWT met that challenge for Aerolíneas Argentinas, which went bankrupt in 2001, a few months before the country fell into political, financial and social crisis. The company, Argentina’s only national airline, began to recover in 2003. Communication would focus on its main brand value: “Argentine-ness.” However, the concept of “Argentine-ness” itself had lost relevance and meaning in the crisis.
The answer: hope. The only way to build new meaning for the concept of “Argentine-ness” was to focus on hope as a powerful social connector. The message was not a banal and obvious one; rather, it was about hope as the cohesive factor that helped avoid social disintegration during the national crisis. The spot asked, “What if this time, those who believe are more right than those who don’t?”
It’s this social and cohesive role of hope that the philosopher Walter Benjamin cited during World War II: “It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.”
If you lose your job, we’ll refund your airfare. That’s the promise JetBlue is giving its flyers, explaining that “while we can’t predict the future, we can take some of the uncertainty out of it and give you confidence to book with JetBlue.” Earlier this year, Hyundai Motor America launched a similar program (“Lose your income, return your car”), which may be one reason the automaker saw January sales in the U.S. increase 14 percent. Projecting confidence while at the same time instilling confidence in consumers during these anxious times makes good business sense.
JWT’s most recent campaign for JetBlue empathizes with everyone, including bigwigs who previously flew privately. “We understand it’s not easy being a high flyer these days,” says a special section of JetBlue’s Web site. “The CFO is picking apart your expense reports. Congress is mad about your bonus. And you can’t even hop on a private jet to the Cayman Islands without freaking out the shareholders.”
Royal Jordanian Airlines has just launched a marketing initiative that’s not about free upgrades or price reductions. Its “Get to Know Your World” competition is simply about consumer engagement.
If you lose your job, we’ll refund your airfare. That’s the 
