Talk about excellent Target Marketing and Customer Engagement, and Lufthansa tops the chart amongst the international airlines!
The airline recently ran an Indian recipe contest, Lufthansa Flavors, for their Indian audience. The contest encouraged and awarded people for submitting an Indian recipe, or voting for their favorite recipe, or even telling a friend about this contest, besides a weekly raffle. They had a dedicated portal, Flavors of India (click to be redirected), for the contest and promoted it heavily on Times of India (TOI) website.
They were clearly targeting the Indians living in the US since the raffle ticket prizes were gift certificates valid for major restaurants chains in the US. Anyway since they don't have domestic operations in India, it doesn't make any sense to target Indians living in India, and causing a huge spillage of marketing resources. Obviously Indians living abroad make for a more qualified audience!
Lufthansa must have availed the geo-targeting option for online advertising with TOI. This implies that Lufthansa's advertisement would show-up each time someone logs onto the TOI website with an IP address from the US. Even from a psychographic perspective, their choice of medium is interesting since a Non Resident Indian (NRI), or a prospective customer for Lufthansa, is quite likely to read the online version of TOI. As a side note, it is also interesting to note their choice of words, for instance, 'raffle' as commonly used in the US and not 'lucky draw' as in India.
But why a recipe contest? I wondered, and came up with a plausible explanation.
Well, food is an important part of both our culture and lives in general (as witnessed by the health of an average Indian). It is also an important way of showing our love and hospitality towards someone. I am sure you have heard stories of how we like to feed our guests to death! It also plays a central role in our festivals, and we do have dishes associated with certain religious and cultural festivals. Moreover, Lufthansa is not the cheapest airline to fly between India-US so I am inclined to believe that it does not target the price sensitive customer, who can put up with a crappy meal to save a few hundred bucks on a 10+ hours flight. Lastly, a recipe contest will also grab the attention of stay-home wives and moms, who by the way travel back home more often.
It would definitely be interesting to know if the contest could have any immediate significant effect on Lufthansa's revenue from the US-India sector even though that may not have been the very objective of the contest.
