2018 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

We wanted to empower Saudi Arabia’s youth to design our cabin crew uniform themselves. Could they do it? We wanted to provide them with a platform from which they could bring their imagination to life by designing the product themselves. We wanted our campaign to be both response driven and relationship building. On the response side, we created a simple call to answer where we asked our audience to design the uniform themselves and share it with us. On the relationship side, we asked our audience to vote for their favourite design, thereby interacting with other creatives and engaging with our brand. We would then engage back by encouraging them through social media to get excited about the campaign, which would create a dialogue in which the brand story would be built.

Creative Execution

The strategy was executed through a social media contest open to all Saudi-based designers. Design submissions were hosted on Instagram, supported by communication via Twitter and Facebook. We created a briefing video outlining our expectations and giving young designers clear instructions on their submissions. The contest opened on Feb 2 and we accepted entries until Feb 19. On Feb 21, the jury, consisting of flyadeal’s top management and functional Heads, evaluated all the entries. Five finalists were selected and given feedback on their submissions. Three designers out of the initial 5 selected were submitted for a public vote, from Mar 20 to Mar 27. Winner was announced on 3rd April.

Results

The campaign shifted consumer loyalty by helping them become personally attached to the brand. Whereas before the campaign, the young consumers were merely passive consumers, after having designed and voted during the campaign they became active participants in creating a brand story. This was demonstrated by the high engagement we got during the campaign. We received over 700 designs by 142 young Saudi designers. Through social media we reached 8.1M people, with almost 700K video views and 734K post engagements. Our campaign created a buzz online and was featured in several news publications such as the Saudi Gazette.

Our campaign reached out to our customers directly, using only social media. Rather than broadcast a message we wanted to engage with them through relationship building and make our customers feel like they’re creating the brand story themselves. For instance, we used Instagram to promote our design campaign and asked them to submit their designs to us in a call to action. This direct engagement meant that we not only resulted in a cabin crew uniform but also created an entire digital community as a result.

In the planning stage, the flyadeal team engaged with female fashion students and designers. The results of consultation sessions with the female students were unequivocal: young designers are willing to push the envelope of female dressing code for professional uniforms in KSA. The insight behind the strategy was very simple: we found that flyadeal’s audience is eager to co-create the future. A successful brand should have the courage to embrace it. The strategic choice followed: flyadeal will engage the creativity of young Saudis, to design the Uniform for the cabin crew. flyadeal targeted the digitally savvy youth, so the company initiated a social media contest for young Saudi designers. Instagram was selected as the main platform since its a visually based competition, and Twitter and Facebook provided support.