When Covid-19 hit, home office became common. Employees got used to the advantages of working from home. Comfortable, private and with short ways to the desk, kitchen, and sofa.

With that, business travellers stopped visiting their clients and replaced personal meetings with video calls. In one year, business travels made by German companies had dropped by 83%.

And a change was not to be expected:

employees wanted to stay at home and preferred meeting online.

This led to a significant decrease of business travels for DB. Video calls became the trains new worst competitor.

For DB, business travellers are an essential target audience. They travel frequently, prefer first class, without being price sensitive. Simply put, business travel accounts for the largest share of revenue, forcing DB to act.

Our aim was to reactivate former business travellers and to increase ticket sales of this target audience.

Everyone knows that personal interactions between businesses and their clients are important. They create trust, bonding and, above all, loyalty. But these personal interactions were lost due to the pandemic.

To bring back business travel by train, we confronted former business travellers with how home office had changed this relationship and promoted in-person meetings.

The campaign was funny and emotional, taking on different perspectives of the new way of working, everyone could relate to.

We highlighted the pitfalls of video calls:

Freezing due to a weak internet connection, muted colleagues, and embarrassing face filters.

And we showed how clients really feel. Stuck in empty offices, lonely and bored. They were pictured longingly gazing out of the window, making paper airplanes, playing with office blinds, and practicing yoga poses in deserted meeting rooms.

Our call-to-action was easy: “Visit your clients in person. With German Rail.”

Objective

Bring back business travel for DB and increase ticket sales.

Target Audience

We had to reactivate all types of former business travellers, e.g. sales personal, C-level management, consultants.

Insight

With video calls being the trains number one competitor, we based our campaign on one insight every business traveler knows by heart:

a fruitful and long-term relationship to clients is best maintained through in-person interactions. And this is not possible with video calls.

Approach

We wanted to motivate business travellers to visit their clients again. And to travel by train.

Instead of communicating the rational benefits of business travel by train - such as comfortable, climate-friendly, safe - we took a more personal approach. Therefore, we triggered an intrinsic desire for in-person meetings by showing business travellers what happens when you don’t travel. The annoying, unpleasant situations everyone disguises but can still relate to.

We used multiple channels to communicate our emotional message convincingly and relatable.

For every channel we found the perfect situation business travellers could identify themselves with:

We showed funny and inappropriate face filters as well as muted colleagues in short online videos. We presented frozen screens, due to weak internet connection, on digital billboards.

And we broadcasted meetings with bad internet connection on radio. Choppy voices led to the funniest conversations.

The emotional highlight: lonely clients on TV and digital video. Accompanied by Eric Carmen’s song “All by myself”, lonely clients were paving the office walls with post-its, stacking coffee mugs or laying on a large boardroom table, waiting for someone to finally visit them in person.

All assets ended with one important message: “Visit your clients in person. With German Rail”

The campaign was a real success, with the highest activation performance ever recorded.

DB managed to increase ticket sales in the business travellers category.

Campaign recall

60% of the target audience remembered the campaign (benchmark: 24%). This exceeded our benchmark by 150%.

Personal Relevance

We reached our target audience. 63% of business travellers agreed that the campaign was personally relevant to them (benchmark: 44%).

Activation Performance

The train returned to the target audience’s relevant set with an activation level of 30% (benchmark 12%). This exceeded our benchmark by 150%.

Ticket sales

The result exceeded all expectations. Ticket sales had increased by 12% and business travellers were visiting their clients again.

Throughout the campaign, newspapers reported on it and people responded enthusiastically.

They loved the campaign and shared the videos and postings with their business clients.