During these troubling times, amidst the coronavirus epidemic, normal life has come to a standstill, including airtraffic. You may have seen across social media and the news the shocking reduction in pollution and carbon emissions due to the halt in travel as people across the world stay inside.

It seems the environment is benefitting from us no longer leaving a human, never mind carbon, footprint. However, it makes us wonder how life will resume once the dust starts to settle, especially for those whose flights are to be rescheduled and those with cabin fever who will wish to jet away for a summer holiday. Will the travel industry experience a massive boom? If so, this drastic increase could once again cause massive pollution to our environment. Perhaps, this time could be used to rethink our behaviour and thoughts on flying and maybe just maintain this state of minimised pollution.

In June 2019, The Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business set Lancaster University’s first year marketing undergraduates a brief to challenge consumer behaviour regarding air travel in response to the climate crisis. Six groups of students, joined by marketing professionals and Lancaster alumni devised a marketing strategy led by consumer insights and behavioural economics in order to target a specific flyer; business leaders, leisure travellers or perhaps academic staff. After presenting their solution to the brief to the audience, three groups were chosen by the judging panel as the finalists due to their creative and innovative marketing campaigns.

After the event, Victoria Metcalf reached out to an award-winning business consultancy, Ethos Farm, to get their feedback and thoughts on these three winning ideas. Sally Alington and Mathew Garner from Ethos Farm are industry experts with a specialty focus in the travel industry and therefore were the perfect people to analyse the effectiveness and practicality of the ideas and how well they feel they could be implemented in real life. This was an extraordinary opportunity for these students to get some constructive criticism on their marketing thinking, the whole reason for the ‘Marketing Me’ event.

This was all wrapped up in an amazing video edited and produced by Stefan Dimov, a Lancaster alumni, who runs a YouTube channel called Project Caritas, which promotes sustainable living and highlights the products now available for consumers to reduce their daily environmental impact. With a representative from each student group giving a voice-over to their marketing campaign brought to life by exciting animations, this video really represents the talent of our Lancaster University students and alumni. The Pentland Centre was extremely pleased with the final ideas and, as Sally and Mathew agreed, all three campaigns were innovative, creative, and would be fantastic if implemented in real life in order to tackle the global climate crisis.

You can see the video produced by Project Caritas via the link in the sidebar. You can also read our previous article about the 'Marketing Me' challenge.