Air NZ takes a different route

Air New Zealand has turned away from big, bold brand advertising for its latest, low-cost campaign.

Word of the airline's Grab a Seat promotion - which sells daily, cut-price airfare specials online - is being spread almost purely by non-traditional marketing methods, such as encouraging staff to pass on a viral email to friends and family.

Some workers even covered themselves in Grab a Seat stickers and walked the streets of Auckland or stood, off-duty, beside busy streets with large Grab a Seat signs.

The company is one of a growing number trying alternative methods of communication for product launches.

Tom Agee, a University of Auckland senior marketing lecturer, says alternative media such as text, email and online are increasingly a part of the marketing mix.

"I don't think there's any one answer," says Agee. "Today [the media environment] is highly fragmented and it takes more and more money to reach the same number of people. People are looking for newer and more direct ways."

He said developing a database of heavy users of a product was increasingly popular.

Air NZ spokeswoman Pam Wong said the Grab a Seat fares were announced to the company's business and consumer customer database, supported by a week-long radio promotion and pop-up shops in malls, where customers could book an online flight.

The promotion's fares were so heavily discounted, an expensive marketing campaign was not an option.

The alternative strategy worked so well that more than 70 per cent of offers were selling out. The company's website traffic also grew to 80,000 hits in a day, a record high.

Advertising agency Publicis Mojo is also using non-traditional methods to launch fast-moving consumer goods.

It will launch a new variant of Goodman Fielder's MacKenzie Bread range later this year using the same channels employed for the product's main launch.

The bread went to market advertised by brown paper bag inserts in newspapers and magazines - plus direct marketing to mailboxes - in a departure from TV strategies usually used for fast moving consumer goods, said Steve Clark, head of channel planning for the media arm ZenithOptimedia.

"Ninety per cent of bread advertising is on TV," says Clark.

Using newspaper inserts rather than TV ads lets the brand get close to its target audience of older consumers with discerning tastes, the majority of whom read the paper before their weekend lunch.

The brown paper bag inserts look the same as the bread's packaging.

Clark said the strategy was not particularly cheap - with low media spend but high production costs for the inserts - but was effective, with the premium bread range now the sixth-biggest brand in the market.