Carrier urges clients to 'stay curious'
Luxury tour operator Carrier is aiming to keep its clients “curious” amidst the coronavirus crisis.
The brand has rolled out its latest digital campaign, Stay Curious, which aims to keep travel front of mind despite the current global restrictions and travel bans.
The campaign primarily focusses on social media content and email marketing and aims to “inspire customers and ignite the senses”.
It launched earlier this month with a ‘Soundscape’ – a sound-based clip - featuring waves lapping in the Maldives. The brand will post one sound clip each week, with content currently planned through to July.
The new content also features recipe ideas, cocktail making suggestions, and there will be a focus on “the idea of time” and how best to spend it.
Natasha Towey, head of marketing at Carrier, said the coronavirus outbreak meant the brand had to put all existing marketing plans on hold and rethink its approach. She said digital content was key currently with recent statistics revealing a 30-40% spike in the time people are spending online during lockdown.
She said: “We spent some time rethinking out approach because we wanted to ensure we were engaging with our clients in the best way possible. Carrier is a human brand and conversation and engagement has always been important to us – and that’s even more important now.
“Our strategy centres around emotional storytelling but we needed to be tone sensitive to the current circumstances. Audiences are looking for inspiration and we’re looking to deliver a very curated form of that.”
Towey said a lot of Carrier’s hotel partners were doing great initiatives around wellbeing and mindfulness, citing brands such as Chiva-Som, Velas Resorts and Six Senses as delivering great content during lockdown.
Carrier, which has always offered key partners overbranded marketing collateral, will continue to support agents with content during the coronavirus content.
Towey said unbranded digital assets including the soundscape clips and PDF spreads of content would be downloadable to agents through Dropbox.
“Whatever we do as a brand we want agents to be part of that – how agents can use what we do is a huge part of our strategic thinking,” she explained.
“We’ve printed and overbranded content for agents over the years and we will give agents access to as much of our digital content as possible for them to use on their social channels.”
Towey said she believed the concept of holidays would change following the coronavirus outbreak, believing that the already “precious holiday” would become more treasured.
“People will travel more thoughtfully and more considerately, and people will really think about how they want to spend their leisure time.”