Air France makes the sky more gloomy than the earth

Air France recently presented its new communication campaign for its Air France Protect program. What is Air France protect?

This is the umbrella brand for all the French airline’s initiatives to reassure passengers and get them back on board the aircraft in “we take care of you” mode.

Air France protect: reassuring passengers

Air France Protect is definitely an excellent idea with a clear promise that addresses passengers’ concerns. And we already talked yesterday about the commercial dimensions of this promise: while everyone tends to abolish change fees, few go as far as Air France to offer a refund.

Given the importance of the subject today, Air France Protect should be more than an offer or a program, but a brand. And so it is logical that a dedicated communication campaign has just been presented.

Air France protect: a blood-curdling campaign

Given the aestheticism that has always been the hallmark of Air France’s communication, whether in terms of visuals, videos or the choice of soundtracks, the level of expectation was high.

It begins with a steward who welcomes the passenger with a reassuring message (hands in heart). Well, you quickly forget that it’s a stewart. In addition to the fact that half of his head was cut off, which dehumanizes the thing a bit and visibly prevents him from wearing a mask, it is the choice of tones that surprises.

Grim Reaper ? Prison guard? Guardian of something else at dusk or in the early morning in the cold? We can imagine him in a colorized version of Schindler’s List but not in the most endearing characters. Or is it the manager of a morgue?

In short, one quickly forgets the heart to find the man rather anxyogenic. He must reassure, be warm, he embodies coldness, distance, death.

And that said this heart is infantilizing but the rest is so beside the point that we don’t even dwell on this detail yet supposed to be at the heart of the message.

Second picture.

I tried to think of “The Beach” with Leonardo di Caprio and Virginie Ledoyen. Then in “La piscine” with Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. Eventually I came to “Jaws”, “Titanic”, or even a film about the Rio Paris tragedy.

We could see two people doing the plank in a soothing and serene context. We see two blue, inert, refrigerated bodies. Add the contents of suitcases scattered around and you have two bodies after a crash. Or two passengers of the Titanic in the cold of the night, trying to survive in an icy ocean. Or having tried: considering the colors one imagines them cooled in a definitive way.

Or is it a reference to the Smurfs? But here we are rather on the ground of Brussels Airlines.

Then a third picture

This one is not contestable even if once again we are in tones that make us think more of a morgue or a funeral home than anything else. We are at a funeral, we pay homage to those who left us without really giving desire for anything.

Surprising communication choices

This campaign has caused a lot of reaction around us and in a unanimous way: it is frightening, it speaks of risk and not of what is done to avoid it, it is cold, it seems to convey two contradictory messages, it is dehumanized, it embodies a castrating order and not “care”. Perhaps because the more fear is instilled in the customer, the more he values the proposed measures?

The universes it conveys are the prison, the funeral, the hospital, the death, the cold, the distance.

In the end they could have cobranded it with Game of Thrones.

In two words it freezes your blood.

This reminds us that Air France has been communicating in a bizarre and counter-intuitive way since the beginning of the crisis and especially since the “recovery”. We will not dwell on the background, where we were sold cost cutting hidden behind a mask and a degradation of service higher than what we can see in its direct competitors.

But in terms of form, sending the director of customer experience to explain with a big smile that this experience is going to be degraded in sometimes very important proportions is like parachuting a lone soldier on Omaha Beach on June 6th 1944! It is not up to her to embody what remains bad news, what remains a degraded experience, what worries. Because even if the message is reassuring, talking about “care”, it necessarily refers to something that is scary.

When the authorities announce the closure of the borders, the sky, the confinement, or restrictive measures, the president sends the Prime Minister, the Minister of Health, a prefect…. and not the Minister of Tourism! Some people are meant to embody the difficult messages so that others, later on, will not be “splashed” and will only talk about the positive.

There are people at Air France in charge of health security or something similar. And they certainly worked on the protocols implemented. It is up to them to carry these messages and the direction of the customer experience must be protected to return to the forefront later. Here, in the same way that some people said that Alain Juppé (former french prime minister) physically embodied taxation, the COVID is being embodied by someone who must embody a certain travel experience that is far from being present today.

A misbehavior?

I am far from being one of the COVID “freaks” but frankly I don’t know if this campaign reassures me and makes me want to fly again. It evokes too many negative feelings where we need warmth, positivity, humanity, care. Coldness, inert bodies: it is a repellent effect.

A very surprising choice because, let’s repeat it, Air France has always been gifted in the choice of the “tones” of its campaigns with the incarnation of a certain identity, a certain promise. One Air France campaign was never mistaken for another and this was the company’s trademark.

We could say that choosing a band named Aswefall for the soundtrack of an advert was a bit daring and even twisted.

Granted, the product was sometimes a bit oversold, the promise a bit out of sync with reality, but the message the business wanted to convey was the one that was conveyed.

Not sure this is the case here.