Tourism New Zealand’s ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ brand platform had established NZ as the ultimate destination for untouched natural landscapes for the past 20 years.

Despite the long-term success of this campaign, many of our competitors were beginning to emulate our strategy of showing their scenery (and they significantly outspend us while doing so).

Our challenge: how do we evolve and elevate ‘100% Pure’ in a new way to reclaim our uniqueness and grow NZ’s consideration as a holiday destination?

We needed to stand for something that made NZ truly unique.

Something that would be difficult for competitors to credibly replicate.

We set out on our strategic journey to uncover a powerful insight.

During the interrogation process, we discovered what travellers to New Zealand loved most about their visit... and the answer was surprising.

Insight: Visitors came for the landscapes, but they left talking about the people.

Kiwis are a warm, welcoming people and their embrace of manaakitanga (a Maori principle of hospitality) means they go to ridiculous lengths to make tourists feel at home while in NZ.

This informed our big idea:

To create an Ambitious global gesture that demonstrates the welcoming nature of New Zealanders.

As the first country to see the sunrise every day, we gave New Zealanders the official role of greeting the entire world each new day with a ‘good morning’.

Critical to our idea of manaakitanga was going to ridiculous lengths to make the world feel welcome by having a unique Kiwi welcome from real Kiwis every single morning for an entire year.

We launched with an emotionally moving recruitment film which explained 100% Pure Welcome to Kiwis.

This helped power the second stage of our campaign - recruiting real, everyday Kiwis from around the country to become the stars of our films.

The campaign consisted of a different Good Morning World video daily as an ongoing, symbolic gesture of welcome.

366 Kiwis showed off their unique culture and place.

• Like 2-year-old Sadie blowing the world a kiss from her rural Northland beach house.

• Or Terau from Tokomaru Bay riding along the beach with his horse.

• And Ray from Te Anau featuring his prized pet, Penelope the Pig.

Bringing it to the world

We needed people to feel our welcome and get a sense of the welcoming personality of Kiwis every morning.

Static media wouldn’t convey the desired emotion.

And we certainly didn’t have the budget to output new TV creative around the world every day.

Social media was our secret weapon.

Because the first thing most people around the world do when they wake up is to scroll through their social media feeds.

And as they’re scrolling, we could be there every morning with a friendly ‘good morning’ from the other side of the world.