In United Kingdom, British Airways is one of the largest international carriers leading the premium airlines around the globe. It offers quality, options, and convenience to around 145,000 customers that fly daily. Among its offerings, BA is well known to offer first-class reservations to passengers in lesser fare as compared to its competitors. However, since the last decade, the company has seen a crisis in terms of revenue generation and the number of bookings. People have started losing faith in British Airways due to numerous unfortunate events and have started taking alternative airlines for their destinations.
After observing a constant decline in its figure, the airline had to come up with a strategy to regain its trust and get more people into opting for British Airways. After considerable analysis, they came to realize that they need to grow their revenue for North America by winning over new passengers travelling to destinations outside of the United Kingdom. And with the competition getting tougher with every airline such as Delta and Virgin Atlantic, they focused their attention on the transatlantic pie. But the 10% revenue growth target set for BA in North America seemed impossible at the first. Obviously, the figures weren’t expected to grow drastically. To their surprise, they found that their greatest revenue chance wasn’t European, Middle Eastern or African destinations, but the double long-haul routes to India. The data revealed an untapped opportunity in the route between North America and India. The market was worth almost $2 billion and BA had less than 5% market share.
Deep diving more into the segment, BA discovered that a larger segment of Indians living within the United States and Canada were travelling to their “home” to either visit friends or relatives in groups to similar destinations every year. Indian expats were BA’s most valuable non-premium audience in North America. This was an enormous revelation. The competition on this route was fierce but fair, as it was focussed mainly on service and product perspective that an airline offers. But BA had the lowest market share compared to other major carriers like Emirates and Lufthansa (with 13.3% and 9% respectively).
To tackle this competitive scenario, instead of focussing on their ‘Indian’ product offerings, they shifted their attention to the emotional Indian aspect. For this, they created a short film with a message “Visit Mum”, depicting a story of an expat son’s surprise visit to his mother in India after a period of 15 years. In the video, the message was focussed on the reunion of a mother and her son which was made possible by British Airways. The video was circulated exclusively online and coupled with social and search-intent data. It was initially questioned by many when shown to the clients as no one thought people will watch a 5-minute-long video, but it received over a million views on YouTube and over 125,000 shares on Facebook. After this, ticket sales from North America to India on ba.com increased by 65 percent in a span of four months since its release and BAs’ share of North America to India route increased from 5 percent to 38 percent.
British Airways found insight from their research analysis where they found that Indian expats don’t need BA to say as they’re one of them but show that they understand them. Indians were not interested in the flights so rather than talking about flights themselves they made everyone hear it from someone else. In the end, who else could have delivered this message of nostalgia, memories and longingness so perfectly other than an Indian mother herself, who was awaiting her son’s return. While the rest of the industry’s players arguing about whose Hindu meals are more authentic and trying to convince Indian expats with their offerings, BA understood that it’s never been about the flight, but more about taking the effort to make a journey back home.
The Visit Mum campaign has made over 1.2 million people all over the world cry. More importantly, direct sales on ba.com went up 65% vs. last year’s data. Also, the indirect sales (through travel agents) were up by 75% against its previous year’s record. The ad, stemmed from the losses BA was incurring since 2012, helped the airline gain an overall 3.3% market share (at the expense of Lufthansa and KLM/Air France) in just four months of launching the campaign, outperforming the market and all its competitions.
-Vidushi Sharma || PGP MR
vidushi.sharma@northpointindia.com