Tapping Into New Growth Markets: Royal Caribbean International

With its traditional cruise ship business under siege from a growing assortment of cruise and non-cruise competitors, Royal Caribbean International (RCI) recognized the need to broaden its image to reach new consumer markets outside of the traditional cruise ship "franchise." To ensure continued success at a time of rapidly changing demographics, it was also essential to generate wider consumer acceptance of cruise vacations as part of the overall vacation "mix." At a time of rapidly intensifying competition, we launched an innovative, multi-faceted marketing campaign to broaden and contemporize the image of one of the world's largest cruise lines while successfully promoting the cruise concept as a viable vacation alternative to an array of critical new growth markets. The agency's challenge was to develop a multi-faceted marketing communications campaign designed to enhance RCI's appeal to younger consumers and other potential first-time cruisers without any disenfranchisement of its existing customer base. We accomplished this by developing an innovative, high-impact publicity campaign boasting a highly newsworthy theme with strong appeal to a broad range of audiences: "Sex at Sea. In partnership with America's leading print authority on love and romance, Cosmopolitan Magazine, we developed a comprehensive national survey gauging consumer's attitudes towards and experiences with "Sex at Sea." We announced the survey results in February, capitalizing on the convergence of National Cruise Month and Valentine's Day. The agency then launched a major national print and broadcast campaign to leverage the extraordinary news value and strong emotional appeal of the "Sex at Sea" topic to generate ongoing publicity for RCI. We created a series of press releases and video and radio news releases spotlighting the "Sex at Sea" theme and showcasing RCI's attributes to create an ongoing stream of publicity in the national and regional press. The media response was tremendous. Our print campaign generated extensive coverage in premier publications ranging from USA Today to Men's Health, to reach more than 16 million consumers. National television exposure on such major outlets as the "Health and Home Report" and News Travel Network reached a total audience of more than 15 million viewers. Our radio news release aired on more than 200 radio stations in the top 100 national markets.