You expect to see Santa, a couple elves and hosts of twinkling lights in the mall during the holidays, but a full-size airplane? That’s what shoppers at Northbrook Court are finding this season! Skill Aviation, a Waukegan-based flight instruction school, decided to put one of their aircraft at the north shore mall and chose Hi-Impact Marketing to handle all the marketing and promotion associated with selling flight instruction gift certificates.
With less than three weeks to develop and deliver marketing materials, Hi-Impact put its resources to work. One of our writers, Brenda Balin, came up with the name for the gift package—The Ultimate Skybox: The Gift of Flight. Our graphic artist, Chris Geimer, created the design theme for the project, a theme that is carried through on the gift certificates, brochures and on the display kiosk. We lined up one printer for printed materials and another for the vinyl graphics designed for the plane itself. Our web strategist, Kim Penny, created a new home page for Skill Aviation, featuring The Ultimate Skybox, as well as pages so that the package could be bought online. Besides keeping everyone on track for our delivery date, the typical role of a project manager, I was also responsible for finding all the materials that would be used for assembling the actual gift box—including ribbons that even the pilots working at the display could handle.
In addition to getting everything ready for the display, Hi-Impact was also responsible for public relations. Brenda, a former newspaper writer, crafted press releases which Dawn Bremer, our inside sales whiz, then distributed and pitched to the local media.
And, even though the official holiday shopping season hadn’t even started when the plane “landed” in the mall on Halloween day, people have been excited about giving the gift of flight. Numerous packages (which include an hour’s flight during which the recipient actually takes control of the Diamond Eclipse aircraft, a 90-minute pre-flight orientation and several goodies such as an official pilot’s log book and a DVD about the thrill of flying) have been sold and several have already been redeemed. One of those folks has even decided to go on for full flight instruction.
As Skip Goss, the president of Skill Aviation, stated, “We are a bunch of pilots who know nothing about marketing; Michelle Lanter Smith and her team at Hi-Impact Marketing took this campaign to a higher level than we could even fathom.”
And, in answer to the oft-asked question, “How did you get the plane into the mall?” – well, it turns out, you can take the wings off.
