Emirates : Destination First

The Emirates ad campaign that celebrated the airline's various destinations had a different and interesting strategy.

When airlines advertise, they try to impress a differentiating factor in their quality of service or exclusivity of product offering. In this industry, the product is the aircraft itself, plus everything in and around it. So you will see ads showing off brand new aircraft, spacious seats and upgraded in-flight entertainment systems, or service ads highlighting on-time service, a wide connectivity network and hot food.

This is also why airlines tend to go in for brand and livery makeovers so often. It is a constant attempt to paint a picture of health and novelty in the consumers’ minds. Wouldn’t you prefer flying in a gleaming, newly-painted aircraft that has “fresh-off-the- assembly-line” written all over it, as compared to one with dull and drab exteriors that have looked the same since ages? Never mind that the decked-up aircraft is more than 20 years old!

And for all its shortcomings, this approach may be right, because when ticket prices are nearly the same, all that distinguishes one airline from another in the mind of the traveler are these superficial benefits or qualities.

The Emirates campaign brought a new dimension to the airline-traveler equation: the destination of travel. It is a strategy that results, I think, from a deep and true understanding of the traveler’s mindset.

When you think about booking a ticket, what is the first, root thought in your mind? Where do you begin the process of planning a trip from?

Your destination.

Every travel plan starts with a destination in mind. The destination is the reason for flying in the first place, isn’t it? It is after the destination is clear that you get down to the lesser details like flight booking, airline, price, stopovers, departure/arrival timing, seats, service etc. It is here, in this segment of the travel planning process that airlines vie against each for space in the consumer’s mind. And breaking this clutter becomes difficult.

Emirates, brilliantly, tried to influence the consumer at one step earlier in the decision making process. Their ads promoted Emirates’ destinations as the reason to fly, not the airline itself. With rich, striking portrayals of popular and exotic travel places like Rome, Barcelona, Las Vegas and New York, the ads created exciting, aspirational images of those destinations in the mind, giving birth to a want. When the time for actual travel to that destination arrived (when the want turned into a need), the rich, visual memory of that destination (as created by the ad) would instantly be linked to the impending journey, creating gratification that the want is about to be fulfilled. And consequently, with the image of the destination in mind, travel to that destination would immediately be linked to Emirates.

Emirates created a want that it enticingly offered to fulfill, and when the want became a need, the consumer automatically associated Emirates as the preferred vehicle to fulfill that need.

Insightful, fresh, and clutter-breaking.