Someone once said you can be a New Yorker without being born there. That's right. I'm one of them. What's the reason for that? New York City - it's equal parts city and state of mind.
Many people feel overwhelmed by NYC, I have absolutely no stress there. New York is my sound and my tempo, it's my inspiration, it pumps me full of energy. When I'm in a taxi from the airport to Manhattan, despite all the chaos, I'm embraced by the cosy feeling of coming home. Home - that is equal parts place and feeling. Home is longing.
In Vienna I often feel homesick for New York, and yet: when I'm on my way back to Vienna, when I look out of the airport window onto the tarmac and recognise the red-white-red tail fin of the Austrian plane that will soon take me back, I get the feeling again: now I'm going home. And each time I come back changed.
Do you know this? Somehow these signals of home in the distance nudge a longing that you can't escape. The tail fin of your home country's plane somewhere in the world, that's a very strong emotional signal, a subconscious feeling of security through belonging.
Homesickness is a very strong emotion. So is wanderlust. And for some of us, homesickness can also be wanderlust.
Fuel for the story engine.
The current edition of Lufthansa's campaign #inspiredby builds on this intense sense of home as a place and a sense of belonging. Already in the third film of the homesickness series, a person tells of his or her journey to one's own identity. This time it is done by the Berlin actress Emilia Schüle, who discovers her roots in her still unknown homeland in Russia.
Homesickness / wanderlust is high-octane paraffin for the story engine and would offer a variety of approaches for long-lasting, sustainable communication with the audience.
Sustainable communication? Would offer?
Yes, because the Lufthansa campaign gets stuck somewhere between the clouds because it doesn't do one thing: actively involve the audience. The gangway is docked, but in the end, effective story sharing doesn't march over it, directly into people's hearts, but tramples along with old, stupid sender advertising. That leaves no room for common ground. Not even on the social media platforms. Only display advertising everywhere.
And yet it would be obvious, because as it says so well in Matthias Claudius' Urian's Journey Around the World: "When a man travels, he can tell a tale. As we know, people like to do this, millions upon millions of them on Facebook, Instagram and TripAdvisor, among others.
Let your audience speak for you.
Because when they tell about their journeys, people are in fact telling about themselves, getting feedback, thereby learning something about themselves again ... And the wonderful story wheel turns incessantly. With stories we explain the world to ourselves. Through stories we find out who we are. If you as a brand can take part in it, or even play a role in it, then you are relevant, because then you take part in people's lives.
When one goes on a journey ...
About five years ago, Expedia 's Find Yours campaign was a masterful presentation of the transformative power of travel and what it triggers in people. The campaign was based on user-generated content, stories from customers' lives. People who travel always travel away from somewhere and at the same time somewhere to somewhere - usually a bit into change, into and towards themselves.
Here are three of those films:
Although I was heavily impressed by this campaign, I unfortunately didn't document it, and you can hardly find anything meaningful on the web anymore. Anyway, Expedia even produced an app at the time, making it easy for the travel community to share their own stories.
That's what story is ultimately about: the shared story of audience and brand. When this story is shared by the audience - symbolically and literally - then storytelling turns into storysharing and then clicks and likes, which are not very meaningful because they are often distributed all too superficially, turn into priceless involvement.
The one decisive factor for success.
By the way, this applies to everyone who does marketing communication, not just international mega-brands. It applies to B2B, it applies to small businesses, it applies to every industry. The real measures of success are Time with Brand and ROI - Return of Involvement, and not short-sighted Return on Investment. Better still ROE - Return of Engagement.
So here's the winning question: how much time does your audience spend with you and your brand, and how much do they actively participate in your story because it's relevant to them? Involvement is the one critical success factor that separates the hackneyed advertising pitch from the wheat with brand nutritional value these days. Involvement - that's real superfood!
You can sow the seeds of success on the field of your activities as early as the conception stage if you internalise a simple principle: no information without interaction.
Small talk is expensive.
I'm not saying it's easy to implement, because it's not at all. That's also why you don't find many well-done campaigns. No, it is not easy. But it is necessary.
Because if you and your audience don't have a topic of conversation that interests both of you, then all you have left is small talk about a single topic. In contrast to boring parties, it's not about the weather, but about the price. And then small talk suddenly takes on a very unpleasant meaning for you.
So if you don't want to just talk about the prize, but respectfully engage with your audience, then engage people with a story that is relevant to you both. Because, as my grandmother, the old Story Dudette, used to say: No Story. No Glory.