Almost 10 years on from the establishment of our sponsorship with Irish Rugby, Aer Lingus has established ourselves as long-standing supporters of the teams. This season however, the activation of our sponsorship was more important than ever to address the challenges of our business, as we faced an extremely competitive marketplace, with price wars raging and huge competition on our doorstep.
It was key for us that we could drive consideration and affinity in our domestic market to deliver on flight bookings, while we had also just rolled out our new brand positioning – a customer-centric outlook focused on ‘the person behind the passenger’.
We understood from research that fans were more likely to engage with the players of the sport, and that is where we identified the opportunity to use our talent to solve our business needs, while reinforcing our human-centric brand messaging in its purest form.
We knew that to successfully achieve our goals, putting the ambassadors and the incredible fans at the centre of our strategy was key. A hard-working strategy that delivered multi-channel was implemented, activated through the lens of our creative platform, Home Advantage – that sees AL bringing #HomeAdvantage wherever the teams play.
As a result of our activity, research showed an increase in consideration to purchase to 51% and an increase in affinity to 48%. This was an improvement on previous years and showed the continued importance of our sponsorship and use of talent for solving business objectives and improving our key brand metrics.
