To do that, we knew we needed to go beyond just competing on price. So, we took a fresh look at our marketing campaign strategy, focussing on what really motivates people to book.
We partnered with Starcom and Google to explore how behavioural science can be applied in our travel marketing to help us connect more meaningfully with potential travellers.
Google's commissioned research showed us something interesting: The application of just two behavioural science principles can be as compelling to at least 1 in 3 consumers as a 10% discount. That insight helped us approach our airline marketing differently.
We developed a marketing campaign strategy that adopts the six behavioural science principles to showcase our unique selling points to travellers outside of New Zealand, who may not be as familiar with our brand.
We started by analysing the use of behavioural science principles in our existing campaigns. We worked with Google on that and used Gemini, powered by Google's most capable AI models, to identify which principles we've been using and how they've influenced results.
The use of AI in our marketing analysis led us to three key findings. First, there was an opportunity to increase our use of behavioural science principles in our campaigns from its starting base of 45% usage.
Second, we had so far only tapped into three of the six key principles in our campaigns. That meant there was an opportunity to test the use of three other principles.
Finally, and most importantly, the ad copies that made use of the behavioural science principles had higher click-through rates of between 13% to 41%.
The AI-driven insights provided us with a clear roadmap for how we could make our campaigns more relevant to travellers and get them from discovery to decision faster, to book with us.