Leave it to a small Canadian airline carrier to show up like no one else!
WestJet, a budget carrier founded in 1996 that services flights to only 85 destinations, scored BIG in a holiday marketing campaign that went viral after posting their video on YouTube.
Here’s how their outrageously successful campaign unfolded:
As passengers boarded their flights in Toronto and Ontario, a Santa appeared on a large screen and asked the travelers what they’d like for Christmas… with wishes ranging from socks and underwear to a flight home for the holidays to a big screen tv!
Behind the screens, employees were furiously taking notes. As soon as the planes took off, teams of employees playing the role of Santa’s elves jumped into waiting vans with lists in hand. Once in the stores, they raced through the aisles buying everything on their lists.
And having a lot of fun!
When the planes landed in Calgary two hours later, 250 surprised passengers watched in awe as beautifully wrapped and personally labeled gifts descended the carousal instead of their expected luggage.
Not a Scrooge or a dry eye in sight!
So what marketing lessons can we take from this heart-warming holiday story that by the way has gotten over 47 million views on YouTube since it went live?
WestJet didn’t pull this off without work. Between August and November when they filmed the video, more than 150 WestJet employees orchestrated everything from designing virtual kiosks for Santa to coordinating the shopping, wrapping, and transporting of gifts to serving cocoa and cookies at the baggage claim area.
Same goes for any small business. A promotional calendar that focuses on a different product or service each month is one way to start putting a plan in to place rather than resorting to a Hail-Mary-hope-this-works strategy.
That way you can stay a couple of months ahead; and if you’re using marketing software like Infusionsoft, you just work down through a checklist:
Any business can send out a Christmas card to their customers. Or a holiday email. Nice gestures and better than nothing but will soon be forgotten.
How about sending out Thanksgiving cards in the mail along with a fun gift basket for your best customers? Or maybe a recorded voice broadcast of your whole team singing “Happy Birthday" sent for ½ birthdays?
A lumpy direct mail campaign we designed for a client was a big hit. Using the dental theme, a sales letter was enclosed in an over-sized mailer that was stamped with “X-RAYS Enclosed: No Not Bend” along with a message on x-ray film to promote one of the services they provide to the dental industry.
Judging by the video below, it’s hard to tell whether WestJet employees or their customers are having more fun.
Pulling off their “Christmas Miracle” certainly wasn’t inexpensive (still a fraction of what a 60-second television commercial would have set them back for) but the free advertising that came from social media gone wild was PRICELESS!
People buy from companies and people that they like and trust.
And in an industry that routinely charges for what used to be free (checked baggage, a meal on long flights even if it wasn’t gourmet, and that gray blanket even if it wasn’t pretty) – WestJet put their customers first and came up a winner.
They put the fun back in marketing.
Most likely your next campaign won’t get the media attention that WestJet’s did, but that’s ok – all you need to do is make some waves in your own backyard pond.
Seize the day!
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