Airline Campaigns That Did Not Take Off

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 Failure is useful for a myriad of reasons. It can be interesting, amusing or even a teaching moment. At the very least, learning from someone else’s mistakes can often be an entertaining form of education. The Airline Industry has been no stranger to its fair share of marketing failures. Many of these were bold attempts to adopt a new strategy, reach a new audience or present a new product in a, let’s say, more unconventional way. While such endeavours are admirable, quite often these statements fall flat.

Many things can lead to a marketing mishap, including botched implementation, unexpected circumstances or just a simple, old-fashioned mistake when making judgements about the market. Consequences can also vary, with some companies managing to survive the onslaught of bad publicity. But others fail to weather the storm and end up going out of business.


1. Hoover 


Hoover is a British household name appliance manufacturer which is famously known for its vacuum cleaner and infamously known in the aviation industry. 

When their sales started dropping they came up with a new marketing campaign. The campaign's main idea is that if someone bought a vacuum cleaner for over 100 pounds then they would receive two free airline tickets. Initially, the campaign allowed only European countries as destinations. They were over the moon with response to the campaign and made Transatlantic travelling a possibility. Here is where it went downhill. The cost of the vacuum cleaners was more than the cost of the flights. The process of receiving free tickets was intentionally made as convoluted as possible and that did not help at all. The company lost millions, provoked a massive backlash and, after a change in leadership, was sold to an Italian conglomerate.


Source: www.wikipedia.com

2. Malaysia Airlines

Malaysia Airlines will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the most disastrous businesses. It was hit by two horrific tragedies in 2014. After Flight 370 disappeared over the Indian Ocean, Flight 17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine. Malaysia Airlines launched a string of poorly communicated and highly controversial marketing campaigns in the midst of leadership transitions and restructuring and is in dire need of rebranding. 


Given the tragedy, its commercials showed travellers as angels, which was a big no-no and it started tweeting a slew of inspirational sayings that were, "If you fell down yesterday, don't stay down”. "Want to go somewhere, but don't know where?" and "Get up as quickly as you can".

After that, a campaign was launched that rapidly grabbed the attention of the international media. Customers were invited to share the places they most longed to visit as a part of a"My ultimate bucket list" campaign.

 

The Malaysian marketing team was not aware of the meaning of a ‘bucket list’, which refers to things a person would like to do before they ‘kick the bucket. Taking Malaysian Airlines’ tragic history into account, this was not the greatest move. 
As the first angry tweets were published, the company altered the name of the competition and apologized profusely. However, the damage was already done. 

Considering the state of the company at the time, a misstep that would have likely derailed another airline barely caused a scratch.





-Saumya Shah

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