Kathryn O’Brien is General Manager Australia at Air New Zealand and a seasoned leader with over 20 years of experience in the travel and tourism industry.
At Air New Zealand, helping people’s travel dreams take flight is what drives us.
Innovation has always been part of who we are, whether it’s enhancing the flight experience for our customers or finding new ways to share our story with those who haven’t yet flown with us.
Outside of New Zealand, however, we’re often considered a challenger brand. That means we need to work a little harder to stand out.
In competitive overseas markets like Australia, making an impression requires fresh thinking, bold ideas, and a willingness to do things differently.
Getting prospective travellers to choose Air New Zealand over other airlines with strong loyalty programmes, however, is no small feat.
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.1 That insight helped us approach our airline marketing differently.
How behavioural science principles powered Air New Zealand’s marketing strategy
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.
We decided to test the improvements in Australia and worked with Starcom and Google to adjust our campaign creatives. We incorporated all six behavioural science principles in the creatives to make it easy for travellers to decide to choose our airline and service.
The experiment ran from July to August 2024 with the objective of boosting click-through rates and bookings, and it was a soaring success.
Click-through rates exceeded our target by 3X and bookings rose to 2X the ambitious target we’d set.
Since our first experiment, we’ve scaled this optimisation strategy to other markets and we’re delighted to see more travellers around the world choosing to fly with Air New Zealand.
