Budget carrier Spring eyeing young flyers

Shanghai-based Chinese budget carrier Spring Airlines launched a two-dimensional mobile suited female figure amid a campaign to attract more young consumers as domestic airlines cope with COVID-related turbulence.

On Friday, Spring launched the mobile suit girl cartoon-inspired mascot of sorts, a genre popular among consumers belonging to Generation Z-people born between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s.

The figure is meant to represent a 17-year-old girl born in Shanghai. She has green eyes and wears green hair accessories, and is often depicted gazing skyward at airports. Spring has also designed personalities, hobbies, wishes and a pet phrase for the figure, and many of the elements mesh with the corporate culture and development goals of the company, it said.

"We hope to establish more in-depth emotional connections with young consumers. When the figure debuted, the initial value of its growth progress was set at 10 percent, and we hope she can keep growing and enrich herself. The image is expected to show up at airports, in cabins and at some offline events. We will also launch more original artwork and videos related to the figure," said Zhang Wu'an, vice-president of Spring Airlines.

With the rapid development of internet and 5G technologies, the user scale of such two-dimensional artwork (also known as ACGN, or Anime, Comic, Games and Novels) has grown steadily in China. By 2023, the number of consumers interested in ACGN-related themes is expected to hit 500 million, and sales in the segment are expected to exceed 200 billion yuan ($30 billion), according to iResearch, a market research company in China.

Back in 2014, Spring became the first domestic carrier to make a concerted effort at developing two-dimensional artwork, and it launched an animation-themed flight serving a Shanghai-Osaka route. During the two-hour flight, there were professional live performances with flight attendants wearing ACGN-inspired costumes.

"The launch of the mobile suit girl is a new attempt by Spring to attract more young consumers. Unlike budget carriers, traditional airlines mainly focus on adult passengers, business travelers and tourists," said Lin Zhijie, an aviation industry analyst and a columnist at Carnoc, a major civil aviation website in China.

"Still, about 20 percent of passengers of traditional carriers are young people aged below 23, and many of them are fans of two-dimensional artwork. They are often the decisionmakers of family travel and will gradually become the backbone group of future business travel," Lin said.

Other domestic carriers have also embraced various innovative measures to hedge against declining passenger numbers due to the pandemic.

In early May, China's fourth-largest carrier Hainan Airlines announced that by displaying boarding passes of the 12 domestic carriers affiliated with the HNA Group, consumers can enjoy discounts on performance tickets and fitness cards for certain places in Chongqing, Dalian of Liaoning province, and Shaanxi's Xi'an.

Hainan Airlines began selling makeup and skincare products through livestreaming sessions last year to gain additional income by leveraging the multibillion-dollar livestreaming market in China.

With the recent resurgence of local COVID-19 cases, domestic air travel demand has been sluggish over the past few months, and a large number of flights were canceled due to low passenger load factors.

In April, 2,930 domestic flights were operated daily on average, and the total number of flights operated in the month declined more than 70 percent over the same period of 2019, when there was no COVID-19, according to the China Air Transport Association.