Finnair
How many Japanese travellers realise it is possible to fly to a European airport in under 10 hours, and from there on to 40 regional destinations? Or that the national carrier of one of Europe’s smaller nations is the second-biggest European airline in Japan in terms of capacity, ranking alongside Air France with 21 flights a week?
That so few are aware of Finnair’s lofty place in Japanese commercial aviation is perhaps the only real chink in its corporate armour. And with the industry here reeling from the effects of the March earthquake and tsunami, it is an anomaly that the airline’s sales director in Japan, Sakari Romu, is determined
to fix.
“We are not known among enough Japanese, even those in the travel trade, so that’s something we have to push,” Romu says in an interview at Finnair’s sales office in Tokyo’s Kojimachi district.
“And we can’t be the second biggest by only being an airline that serves Finland. To be successful, we have to reach out to people who are going to Europe in general.”
To achieve that, it must find a way to promote the Helsinki route to seasoned travellers already equipped with an impressive knowledge of Europe’s best-known destinations.
Romu concedes the difficulty of that task, yet behind his modesty are many inspired decisions that have kept Finland at the centre of Japan’s commercial aviation market.
The first, says Romu, was to direct its marketing energies towards leisure, rather than business travellers. As other airlines scaled down their Japan presence, Finnair was expanding here.
“I can’t speak for other companies, but many of them had relied very much on the business segment, so after the Lehman shock it was very hard for them,” he says.
“In a way, our weakness has also been our strength, because we didn’t have that many business travellers at that time, and the leisure segment wasn’t hit nearly as hard.
“Of course there have been periods when we have had fewer passengers – during the SARS and bird-flu crises, for example – but generally we have been growing very steadily in the leisure sector.”
Since it began its Japan service in 1983, with just one flight a week from Narita, Finnair has become one of only two European airlines (the other is Lufthansa) to offer daily flights from Narita, CENTRAIR near Nagoya and KIX near Osaka.
Finnair’s passenger makeup has shifted slightly since it started operating daily flights between Tokyo and Helsinki 15 months ago.
“Until we reached that stage, any attempt to reach out to business travellers would have been a waste of resources,” Romu says. “You need a minimum of five or six flights a week to attract that kind of passenger, whereas with leisure travellers there is more room for flexibility.”
He is realistic enough to accept that few outgoing business passengers will end their journey in Finland, even to indulge the perennial Japanese passions for the Moomins (Tove Jansson’s fictional trolls who dwell in Finland’s forests) and the aurora polar lights.
Instead, over the course of a year, about 90% of all passengers from Japan use Finland as a gateway to dozens of other destinations in Europe.
“Our main strategy is to concentrate heavily on secondary cities in Europe, places to which there are no direct flights [from Japan].
“The main point is to have a good service and good connections to the places Japanese want to travel,” he says, adding that Finnair hopes to exploit a newfound interest among Japanese in Eastern European, Baltic and Scandinavian destinations.
Finnair’s success in Japan owes much to an inspired advertising campaign, launched just over a year ago, which has since influenced the carrier’s marketing strategy in other countries.
The message behind the ads, which were found mostly in newspapers, magazines, and airport terminals, is beautifully simple: Finnair is the fastest route to Europe. The Japanese actor Koji Yakusho – dubbed “Mr. Europe” in the campaign – was chosen to front the ads because he combines familiarity, trustworthiness and sophistication.
“Ad agencies told us, ‘If you are unknown in Japan, then let’s pick someone who is not unknown and make it big for you. That’s why Koji Yakusho was chosen – everybody knows him.
“The main point is that, in my opinion, you only get results if you market your service in a local way. We’re not bringing our global or European campaigns to Japan, we are doing it in a local way, with local characters like Mr. Europe. We have been very successful doing it that way.”
The message to consumers, Romu points out, was that like Yakusho, they would be “first in line to Europe”, not just to Finland.
The unusual approach was given the blessing of the head office in Helsinki from day one. “We do the same in other regions now, using locally well-known characters to front our campaigns, such as [former international footballer Pierre] Littbarski in Germany,” he says. “In Europe, the industry has not traditionally used celebrities, but in Japan it works very well.”
It is impossible to overstate Japan’s importance to Finnair’s global strategy. The airline’s Japanese sales are the largest of all its foreign sales; and in August 2010 its monthly sales were greater in Japan than in Finland, the first time overseas sales had exceeded those at home.
Some of the credit for that must go to Finnair’s attention to the market outside the Tokyo metropolis. Romu firmly believes that competitors have made an error of judgment in treating Osaka and Nagoya almost as an afterthought, or ignoring them altogether.
“As a European carrier that doesn’t serve Osaka and Nagoya, you stand to lose a lot of business. They really are separate markets.”
Finnair, like every other airline in Japan, has been adversely affected by the Tohoku disasters and the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. But despite the sharp downturn – the number of leisure passengers from Europe is still close to zero – Romu is optimistic about Japan’s place not just as a source of visitors to Europe, but as a destination for incoming tourists and businesspeople.
“There is still a huge opportunity to build traffic between Japan and Europe,” he says. “The disasters notwithstanding, Japan is becoming a more popular destination among Europeans.”
That opportunity could be realised in the next couple of years, when aircraft will be able to use both Narita runways to take off and land, enabling Finnair to consider a second daily flight from that airport. “We are interested, willing and have the capacity to increase the frequency of our flights to Japan,” Romu says.