Brief Explanation

There are low margin businesses. And then there are airlines. High fuel costs, heavy taxes and planes that need to fly whether they are full or not mean every single consumer dollar is aggressively fought over. This paper is about Air New Zealand flying the ‘trans Tasman route’ between Australia and New Zealand. This route represents 31% of Air NZ’s total flying. It’s so contested that at least 2 of the 7 carriers have a sale everyday. We were tasked with significantly improving the already highly efficient retail sales without further discounting prices. We had to do something quite different to achieve the objective. We did. Sales increased by 60% and revenue by 30% with an online reality show that delivered an ROI of 6 to 1. This show was called Air NZ Presents: The Kiwi Sceptics. It was designed to showcase New Zealand to an audience who prefer to go to other more ‘exotic’ holiday destinations. The aim was to show a more varied and progressive side of New Zealand than the popular view of rugged mountains, lush fields and Hobbits. We found four real Australians who all said that they wouldn’t go to New Zealand in a million years and set out to change their mind. In six minute digital episodes we documented our attempts to convert these New Zealand hating Australians into passionate advocates. The first job was to get them on a plane. So we lied. We told them they were going to their dream destinations before surprising them with the truth. Their unwitting journeys that followed became the basis for our show. The outcome was that the brand activity improved the performance of the retail sales to levels never seen before. The Kiwi Sceptics campaign delivered Air New Zealand’s first ever Million dollar day of online sales, not once but 3 days in a row. This paper documents how brand activity can dramatically improve the effectiveness of retail sales. The analysis is based around comparing the contribution of two-like-for-like sale periods - one with The Kiwi Sceptics brand activity and one without. That the campaign delivered the best results in Air NZ’s history would indicate that this brand approach worked.