Targeting the Audience in Marketing

Facing Some Home Truths: Qantas

Qantas’s recent “Feels Like Home” television advertisement campaign has garnered attention from a variety of stakeholders from corporate interests to customers and workers. Although there are clearly differing perspectives, evident discrepancies in the reception of Qantas as a brand are manifest across all three stakeholder groups. Corporate interests may focus on revenue and customer intake whereas customers consider services offered, price value, and customer loyalty programs. Workers meanwhile likely think about employee programs and benefits such as job opportunities and competitive wages. Yet despite the different understandings of the airline industry by each stakeholder group, there is also a shared understanding of the quality associated with Qantas—allowing it to remain successful as an Australian icon for more than 95 years (Baumann et al., 2017).

Qantas' "Feels Like Home" campaign has received largely unconstructive feedback from the aviation industry, with stakeholders pointing to a disconnect between the narrative created and its core message. At its core, it appears that the sentiment and emotion explored in this television campaign failed to target an audience that valued facts over emotion and neglected to link their experiential promise with tangible outcomes. Despite its strong production quality, the lack of detail in how Qantas is responding to emerging trends has left many unimpressed - resulting in a disengaged stakeholder base. Therein lies the apparent weakness of this approach; while evoking a powerful emotional connection with its Australian viewers, missing is the clear demonstration of an actionable corporate strategy from Qantas. The strengths of this approach still remain as it taps into common cultural touchpoints of homecoming and family reunion, however without significant and transparent data points on how these values are expressed through Qantas services and operations, the reaction will continue to be underwhelming.

An exploration of the gap between “brand identity” and “brand image” can help to shed light on divergent stakeholder perceptions of a particular brand and reveal the implications for a successful advertising campaign. Qualitative analysis provides a powerful way to examine this phenomenon within the context of a case study in greater detail - allowing insights into how companies portray and build their brands, compared to stakeholder interpretations. To bridge any divergence in understanding between different stakeholders, it is essential to employ qualitative analytics so design future campaigns from an informed standpoint.

Developing an advertising campaign involves numerous major decisions. The first and most important decisions to make is what the target market should be, as this will inform the rest of the decisions that need to be made. Next, there should be a strategy developed to reach out to the desired target market through understanding their needs, wants, and desires. After that, objectives need to be identified in order to accomplish these goals which will help drive their creative content. If we take Qantas as an example, they could have gone in a different direction by targeting people who value timely departures with safety being their main goal both literally and metaphorically.

The Qantas News Room serves as an important platform for the company to effectively communicate its marketing and promotional messages. Given its prominence, it is essential to evaluate the role of public relations (PR) when using this resource. PR enables organizations such as Qantas to create a community with their stakeholders through robust two-way communication. This helps to inform and educate its customers on the various product offerings while also allowing them to provide direct feedback. Consequently, an understanding of public relations is a critical element when leveraging this digital asset as part of an overall promotional strategy (Key & Czaplewski, 2017).