SAS Economy Extra - The story of Christian

With "The story of Christian", SAS portrayed empathy and ideas for solutions

Challenge
SAS chose to change the name of one of their products. At the same time, they wanted to communicate understanding of a well-known dilemma for many business travelers: that their airplane tickets may be cheap for the company, but they leave the traveler with many frustrations of the stressful life of travel. SAS’ answer to that dilemma is the degree of flexibility in Economy Extra tickets. These are only slightly more expensive than Economy tickets but give the option to rebook - a characteristic of business class tickets. They're an economically viable solution for the company and an opportunity for the business traveler to harmonize private life and travel.

A rational and emotional involvement of the target group
involving the target group both on a rational and an emotional level was the crucial element. The arguments spoke for themselves and were supported by an animated soap opera in four short episodes. The idea was to get the target audience to identify with “poor Christian”, who has to go through a lot to create the right balance between a busy travel life, an ambitious boss and an impatient wife. The solution is Economy Flex tickets, which is gradually made clearer throughout the animation. The target audience was invited to follow “the story of Christian” on SAS’ website via letters and emails – and they had the chance to both earn EuroBonus points by answering questions about the product after each episode and reflect on their own travel life.

Results
The campaign was spot on in relation to the experience many travelers themselves have about how colleagues, relatives and friends see them as privileged because they “get to travel all the time”. The reality is that this kind of life is not very exotic and the stress level is typically very high. With this campaign, SAS succeeded in showing understanding for the traveler’s hectic life.

• ROI: +15 – including all direct and indirect costs, which is very rarely seen in similar campaigns
• 11,463 customers have been through the campaign, which has not been executed in the general media, but rather only with media directly addressed to our busy and much-traveled audience