Aviation Marketing:
Decoding Consumer Reaction to a Virgin Airways Ad

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Welcome! At Fastuna we get giddy about using our own automated market research tools to run quick tests with consumers all over the world. We get particularly excited when there's a shiny new controversial ad to pick apart.

This is one of those times.

Virgin Airways Australia just released a new ad. Now, why do airlines advertise?
Ultimately, to gain an edge over competitors. Duh.

So, the question is:

Fasten your seatbelts.
This is what we discovered through rapid consumer feedback.

Airlines don't just sell paper tickets, they sell a service. And marketing a service isn't so easy. You can't touch it, taste it, and (hopefully) you can't smell it.

Virgin Australia got creative to work around this issue. The ad features a team of baggage handlers putting on a cheery dance performance while a sour-faced teenager watches them from her window seat.

Spoiler alert: the teen smiles at the end.

So, was the creativity rewarded?

If you go to YouTube or other websites with open comment sections you'll see plenty of hate for this ad.
It will give you the impression that the ad failed.

Reading comments on social media can be misleading:

Our market research tool took 4 hours to collect the respondent's feedback and generated a report.

The General Perception score reflects the overall likeability of the ad. It is also based on the KPIs that signal a person's readiness to ENGAGE with the tested material, namely: the desire to learn more about it, share it with others and to try the advertised service.

The score is above average - a good result (especially for an ad that wasn't so well-received online).

To see the full picture, let's take a look at the breakdown of 9 metrics that reflect the consumer attitude.

Instantly we can spot the culprit: Believability scored critically low as indicated by the color red. There is also a lack of Clarity and a less-than-satisfactory Learn more metric.

Another feature of the report is the open-ended question section.
Paired with the interactive word cloud, it shows the number of positive, negative and neutral reactions, and allows to understand the "why's" behind the metrics in the dashboards.

Explore more opinions and play with the word cloud in the live dashboard:

Coming back to our question:

Does the ad by Virgin Australia manage to communicate the airline's advantages?

It's not a resounding yes…but it's a yes.

If only the clarity and believability was tweaked to maximise the ad's potential.