Hundreds of people at London Luton Airport were treated to a spectacular festive surprise, as they witnessed the world’s first Christmas light show to feature a 120ft aircraft. easyJet provided an A320 Airbus to airport ground staff who created the spectacular festive experience by wrapping the aircraft with Christmas lights. The light show left the audience in awe, as they observed the Christmas light switch-on, as festive projections and lights synced to the sound of a contemporary remix of Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Over 850,000 choreographed light sequences and 1.5 miles of LED micro bulbs were used to create the unique light show. The team of ten special effects artists and lighting designers, spent four weeks working to design and create the light show ahead of the big reveal. London Luton Airport and Europe’s leading airline, easyJet, collaborated to bring Christmas cheer to hundreds of airport staff who have been involved in the expansive, three-year redevelopment of the airport, which increases the annual capacity of the airport to 18 million passengers by 2020. The £160 million regeneration project will add £1 billion to the UK economy and an extra 10,000 jobs by 2030. The Christmas light show is part of the airport’s 80^th anniversary year celebrations.

Airport ground staff painstakingly covered easyJet’s 5,000sq metre aircraft hangar in Christmas lights and decorations and the team were given just 24 hours to create the festive transformation ahead of a grand reveal to an audience who watched the stunning moment a 120ft aircraft was illuminated in light. Local children from Chantry Primary Academy and Whitefield Primary School were invited to the big unveiling, as 9-year-old Maddy Simonite switched on the lights for the first time. Maddy said: “Switching on the lights made me feel like I started Christmas! I’ve been to see the Oxford Street Christmas lights but this was ten times better!”

Neil Thompson, Operations Director, London Luton Airport remarked: “As we reach the end of our redevelopment – the largest in the airports 80-year history – we wanted to extend a huge thank you to staff and customers and give them a special Christmas gift. Our team were given just 24 hours to dress an entire aircraft hangar and easyJet A320 Airbus plane before guests were treated to a dramatic Christmas lights switch on.” Tina Milton, Director of Cabin Services, easyJet added: “Most people who work in a regular office get to partake in festive decorating, so we laid down the challenge to ground crew to create the most spectacular light show featuring a plane. We were delighted to work with London Luton Airport to help get the festive feeling started amongst our staff and the local community in Luton.”

See the images here: https://www.flickr.com/gp/taylorherringpr/4fF5r9
Watch and download the video here: https://vimeo.com/306415740/2b9a3fa707
Watch and download the making of here: https://vimeo.com/306426320/57a11b2223

James Herring and Sam Corry were the Taylor Herring creative team behind the campaign and the film was produced by the agency’s production arm, St Marks Studios. The projection and lighting design was delivered by lighting effects specialists Projection Artworks, and production managed by Max Gheysens at St Marks Studios.

Earlier this year, Taylor Herring launched a recruitment campaign for easyJet, designed to inspire more girls to become airline pilots. The campaign video set out to challenge gender stereotyping, by reimagining a scene from Hollywood movie Catch Me If You Can, in which Leonardo DiCaprio impersonates a pilot.

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Hamilton Sargent, Contentainment & WDFG Account Manager at Blackjack Promotions explains why great storytelling works so well in the airport retail environment.

Great marketing is all about telling stories that resonate with your target audience – and that’s why successful brands focus so much on their origin and history. Storytelling is not just a key vehicle for communicating brand values, but also for driving engagement.

Arguably, storytelling is even more important in the travel retail environment than it is in other spaces.

That’s because air passengers are in a uniquely heightened emotional state; some are stressed by the thought of flying with adrenaline and hormones running through their system, while just as many are in a holiday mood. If they’re waiting to fly off somewhere, whether it’s on business or for pleasure, then they want something to do before heading for the boarding gates, so they tend to browse the duty-free shops and other retail outlets. If they’ve just arrived, there is an element of relief at getting their feet back on the ground and escaping from the confines of the plane.

If you want air passengers to stop and pay attention to your brand and your product, then you need to invest some time and effort into creating a story that resonates with them, attracts them and stops them in their tracks.

What you should be doing is getting passengers into the realms of play, imagination and creativity, which is fundamental to building rapport, and appealing to their emotional side.

That’s why stories, particularly featuring characters, settings and themes from familiar tales, work so well in the airport retail environment.

Of course, many brands don’t need to plug in to fairy tales, films, books and the like in search of good content; they already have great origin tales they can build on. Some have been making a business out of stories for decades. Disney, for example, is brilliant at creating multi-generational engagement through its films and other properties. Then there are product and even service brands which can call on their own heritage – that’s particularly true of high end toiletries, cosmetics and perfumes, spirits brands and speciality food brands, but there are very few brands that don’t have great stories, if someone does some digging.

Even retail outlets can have their stories to tell about what the store is all about and what’s happening there that day… For stores, though, it is likely that the real impact will come from using brilliant themes and characters that come from a shared cultural heritage.

“We’re all mad here”

We recently ran an activation for World Duty Free, which was themed around Alice in Wonderland. When you use a mascot or a story like Alice in Wonderland, you’re reaching into the consumers’ creative mind and they become more receptive to your messaging, because of the familiarity of the scene and the characters – and even quotes.

Our Alice in Wonderland experiential activation was all about relaxing travellers and calming them down. It was also particularly effective with families – if you relax the children, you relax the parents. And don’t forget, the parents are the ones who are going to be spending.

It’s important, though, that you make an effort when you are using any kind of experiential brand storytelling. With Alice in Wonderland, World Duty Free became Wonderland, and all the language and the set up had to be true to the world of Lewis Carroll. The actors also had to be properly in character, and their actions and words had to be true to

the original creation, while still delivering key messages for the client. For example, Alice couldn’t be seen to be directly promoting anything – so she had attendants (other brand ambassadors) who handed out leaflets with offers.

Lights, camera, action

There also has to be a purpose to any experiential storytelling activity, beyond simply getting the attention of shoppers and passers-by. There has to be a strategic marketing justification for it, beyond just mobile window dressing, as it were. What does the retailer or brand want to achieve?

You also need to put effort into delivering the best possible experience for travellers, with high quality costumes, props and sets, and professional actors. It has to be a piece of theatre! So, for example, when we were casting for the Alice in Wonderland activation, we had potential actors come in for workshops to see which worked well together. It’s a proper production!

Alice is a great character, as are many of the other people and animals from Lewis Carroll’s books – and there is something fundamentally British about her. You only have to look at similar characters (with their supporting environments) like Paddington Bear or Peter Pan to envisage the potential.

Be careful, though – what resonates with a British audience may not work with an international one. You have to be obvious, not obscure.

World Duty Free has been using costumed characters for so long now that it has almost built up a generational loyalty — if you have families with kids who frequently fly, then often the kids will demand to stop off to see the mascots.

You also need to remember that travellers who engage with experiential activity are investing their time in you, and are not just there to be milked for cash. Build rapport through having non-sales related conversations that establish that both the shopper and the brand ambassador are people. The biggest secret to selling is to create a relationship with the customer first…

Blackjack Promotions is the leading staffing solutions, travel retail and experiential specialist, with operations in the UK & Ireland, and the Middle East. Everything it does is committed to connecting consumers with brand experiences that are exciting, engaging, immersive, and that ultimately provoke a real emotional response. Its core service offering falls under three headings: travel retail, experiential and logistics. It also works hand-in-hand with agency partners and media owners using its experiential expertise to bring brands and briefs to life.

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Alex Palmer from Haygarth explores the far-from-normal retail experience in major airports and what shoppers are looking for when travelling.

Between packing your bags and jetting off on your summer holidays, you’ll no doubt pass through one of the vast shopping areas found in major airports. It’s a retail experience like no other – where else would you order a pint at 6am, grab £100 sunglasses on a whim, panic-buy a dangerously big bag of sweets for the office or pay twice the high street price for a bottle of water without a second thought? Also… luggage shops. Who’s buying luggage at the airport?!

It’s certainly a far cry from the normal weekly shop or a trip down the high street. But away from the idiosyncrasies, there are some strong fundamental principles of retail in play that tap into a totally different shopper mindset and set of behaviours. Which is little wonder when you consider that the value of the travel retail sector is estimated to be £50bn, rising to £90bn (M1ndset report, 2017) – clearly it’s doing something right.

You only have to look at WHSmith to see this in effect. While it was recently voted ‘the worst high street retailer’ (Which? Survey 2018), with trade down 5%, its same figures in travel retail saw a rise of 7%. Without the threat of Amazon looming over it, and with a captive audience of shoppers keen to bag some holiday reading, plane snacks and a bottle of water to replace the one they had to hand in at security, the store is a finely-tuned retail machine. If good shopper and retail marketing is about keeping it simple, WHSmith excels here. Its stores are well-placed, key product categories (newspapers, books, drinks and confectionary) are well-positioned to maximise impulse purchase, stock is managed efficiently (from a merchandising and replenishment perspective) and unlike the high street equivalent, the till area is well-staffed. In other words, it’s optimised for shoppers who want to get in, get what they want and get out without having to Usain Bolt it to their gate.

At the other end of the spectrum, away from holiday ‘commodities’, there are other interesting observations in luxury/premium goods. This area is less focused on fast-paced, impulse shopping and more about considered purchase, often where the shopper is not the end consumer. Because of this, retailers and brands set out their stall in a completely different way, with service and experience playing a more heightened role.

For spirits and cosmetics in particular, travel retail exclusives, gifts with purchase and premium sampling are really effective ways of engaging shoppers in a ‘must-buy’ opportunity. Jack Daniel’s’ ‘Bottled in Bond’ is a great example of an exclusive premium SKU developed specifically for travel retail to increase desirability for whiskey lovers (and/or gifters). Likewise, cosmetics giant Estée Lauder has achieved huge growth in travel retail through a combination of exclusive sets and scents and beautifully designed stores with attentive service. For the modern, savvy shopper, both examples offer increased value over and above price/discounting. Of course, it’s also a big help when the layout of the airport (such as Gatwick) creates a deliberate flow of customers right past your retail space.

Both Jack Daniel’s and Estée Lauder have demonstrated an understanding of how shoppers think, feel and behave in the travel retail environment – tailoring their offering to a broad range of travellers, with a broad range of motivations and needs. From the business executive passing through for the 5th time that month, looking to pick up a gift for their partner, to the excitable family on their first holiday of the year with some money to spend on travel accessories; the opportunity for brands and retailers is to understand these behavioural differences and deliver the right product, in the right way, at the right time. With a guaranteed high shopper footfall passing through everyday, it’s too big an opportunity to miss.

Alex Palmer is an Account Director at Haygarth, an award-winning creative agency that create powerful brand and retail ideas that amaze and persuade people to buy.

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