LOS ANGELES: Lufthansa, the air carrier, has successfully leveraged Snapchat’s messaging app as a tool for humanising its brand.

Daniel Abt, Lufthansa’s marketing manager for the Americas, discussed this subject at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2018 Digital & Social Media Conference.

Although the airline is known for “being perfectionist, for being safe, reliable, on-time”, he explained that it also wanted to be seen as a “warmhearted” brand – and believed Snapchat could help achieve this goal.

“We wanted to create authentic stories that humanise our brand and inspire travel and promote customer loyalty,” Abt said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: How Lufthansa embraced Snapchat to drive brand “warmth”.)

Lufthansa’s marketing department settled on using “Snapchat Stories,” which allow users to string together photos and videos in a loose narrative, to give a unique perspective into its brand.

Rather than polished and scripted messages from its brand guardians, these “Stories” would be posted by members of the airline’s flight crews as they prepared for, then embarked on, their trips.

“We see our crews as our ultimate brand ambassadors. They provide one of the most personal touchpoints for our brand in the air,” Abt said.

“Having the crews basically talk on Snapchat on behalf of Lufthansa would be a natural continuation of the human interactions they have anyway.”

Finding the right volunteers and making sure they understood what Lufthansa was trying to accomplish on Snapchat became an essential task.

“Our crew department went out and recruited lots of social-media-savvy colleagues from within the flight crews, ideally, with some experience already [of] representing the brand externally,” Abt said.

“We brought them in and hosted workshops in Frankfurt and Munich at our crew bases, gave them the whole marketing vision, the whole marketing idea, everything around brand value, and basically got them on board with exactly what we had it in mind.”

Another objective, he reported, was establishing a system of “governance and quality control” for its Snapchat Stories – vital to getting internal buy-in from corporate leadership and the various departments that had to be involved.

“Before any single crew Story goes out – and it doesn’t matter how many times they’d done it before – they needed to get a briefing from phone by the marketing department. All these structures needed to be in place before we could actually start,” said Abt.

Sourced from WARC