You can’t e-mail a hug

“You can’t e-mail a hug” was an advertising slogan that I spotted recently, plastered on a huge billboard outside my local railway station. The product in question? Coffee.

I was puzzled too - surely that’s a pitch for travel rather than a caffeine kick - but it made me think how airlines have shifted their marketing away from the act of physically moving people from point A to point B, instead focusing on the experience of travel and the intangible benefits it brings.

One of my former colleagues told me about an old SAS advert, which simply asked “Do you know what a snowflake tastes like?”. Subtle. Lufthansa has some nice examples too. For the business market, it used the strapline “Networking, a product of Lufthansa”. In a similar pitch for the leisure market, the text read “Little money, little sleep, lots to tell”.

The one that sticks in my mind is “Togetherness, a product of Lufthansa”, from a campaign which ran around 2009, but while researching this blog post I discovered that this first ran in 1964 as “Togetherness is a trip on Lufthansa”. I wonder if the creatives behind that 1960s campaign ever imagined that slogan would be back in use 50 years later.

Half a century has passed since then and travelers have changed as much as the aircraft they fly on. This particularly applies to younger travelers, who use cheap flights to seek out new experiences and fuel their social media habit.

Once upon a time people predicted that technologies, like video conferencing, might pose a real threat to air travel. However, with easyJet and Ryanair’s full-year load factors hovering around 90%, the desire to travel is still going strong.

To steal Nescafe’s slogan, you can’t e-mail a hug…or a handshake.