Malaysia Airlines, Taste Tour

Our strategy was to build on the success of our initial 2018 campaign, carry the learnings over and cover the new objectives. We wanted to curate a global food extravaganza that highlighted Malaysian cuisine to a wider audience. In order to ensure there would be interest from a cross-section of media and consumers, we hand-picked the co-founders and chefs of the restaurant, ‘Kricket’, to travel to Malaysia to meet local chefs and learn about Malay cooking which was to be used for content and PR purposes. Following the trip, we created a restaurant pop-up for four days in a Central London location to take the food to the consumer.

We placed a large focus on PR reach and put a lot of emphasis on the competition entries. All customers (excluding companies affiliated with the event/campaign) who visited the restaurant were invited to enter. Prizes included business and economy class tickets with hotel stays for our lucky winners. Learnings from year one told us that the promotion of destinations within Malaysia worked well as there were clear peaks in interest in the highlighted destinations. Based on this, we promoted partner destinations through a series of press, OOH and in-house branding at the restaurant.

On the back of the 2018 campaign, we enlisted BBPR for a second year to manage all the press coverage during the tour, the lead-up and the live restaurant dates. After the tour BBPR published an 800-word interview which was featured on the Flight Centre’s blog and newsletter. The article featured an embedded version of the Tour Edit and imagery from the menu. Despite being contracted to just three posts, Kricket posted to their main Instagram feed 6 times and on Instagram Stories a total of 37 times. During the tour of Kuala Lumpur and Penang and once back on UK soil, they continued to post engaging content, driving sales and using campaign handles and hashtags. Their Instagram edit achieved over 25,000 views and generated significant engagement. The clip was then also used through partner channels.

For the actual pop-up restaurant event, we sold 306 tickets on ‘Design My Night’ booking page. We managed to secure a partnership with the most acclaimed food influencer in the UK, Clerkenwell Boy. They launched imagery which required foodies to follow Malaysia Airlines, Kricket and to tag three foodie friends to enter the competition, meaning entrants tagged 2,250 of London’s foodies in the comment section – a huge win for the campaign.