The end of ‘Cruise Like a Norwegian’?

It looks like we won’t be cruising like Norwegians for too much longer.

Norwegian Cruise Line has put its creative and media accounts up for review. According to Ad Week, the current account holder, the Martin Agency, declined to participate in the review. 

The move follows close on the heels of the departure of Maria Miller, the Norwegian senior vice president for marketing, who was behind the line’s “Cruise Like a Norwegian” slogan.

Devised after Martin won the business in 2011, the campaign celebrated vacationers who embodied the “passion, freedom and flexibility” of the company’s Freestyle Cruising concept.

“Cruising like a ‘Norwegian’ is for those who live life to the fullest, embrace new adventures and are passionate about their experiences,” is how the concept was described on announcement.

It coincided with a campaign by former Norwegian CEO Kevin Sheehan to root out use of the abbreviation NCL, which Sheehan thought was not understood by most potential guests.

Whether “Cruise Like a Norwegian” was any better understood is something I’ve always been curious about.

I’ve interpreted the slogan as a kind of creative conceit that imagined this group of fun and intrepid people that Norwegian chose to call “Norwegians.” Taken in those terms, cruising like them made some sense.

Taken in literal terms, it is hard to imagine that the average consumer would know anything about how someone from the country of Norway cruised. Why would they want to cruise that way? Too literal, perhaps, but for someone new to cruising it could have been a head-scratcher.

The campaign did have the virtue of pounding home the name of the brand at every turn. It would be hard to watch the company’s current ads, with their lively “Let’s Go” theme music and catchy “Cruise Like a Norwegian” coda at the end, and mistake them for an ad from some other cruise line.

Then, too, ad campaigns run their course over time. After four years, the mileage on “Cruise Like a Norwegian” was starting to pile up. Norwegian spent $33 million last year on measured media, according to Kantar Media, spreading the gospel on Freestyle Cruising.

Now Norwegian has a new president in Andy Stuart, and its parent company, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, has a new CEO in Frank Del Rio. They’re entitled to a marketing theme of their own.

Beyond the marketing pitches

By Tom Stieghorst

Sometimes the reasons people cruise can’t be found in any catalog or sales brochure. The passenger who took 33 consecutive cruises aboard the Carnival Elation earlier this year is an extreme example.

Mark Fosselman found himself on the same itinerary over and over again following the loss of his wife, Becky. She had been in ill health, and the two had shared numerous cruises on the Elation before she passed away in April.

Fosselman told Carnival that the ship held special memories for him and that cruising was very therapeutic in helping him mourn his wife and come to terms with her death.

There are many conventional selling points to a cruise. But often it isn’t the size of the cabin, or the itinerary or the food that people care most about when they’re on a cruise.

When I asked a man on a recent cruise why he was on the ship, there was no hesitation: “I wanted to spend time with my brother,” he said. The passenger lived in Tennessee, his brother in Michigan. They didn’t see each other regularly, and a weeklong cruise was a chance to catch up.

More than marketing slogans or ad campaigns, the human need for connection and recognition often drives the choice of a cruise vacation. One passenger on another cruise I took recently was astonished to be the center of attention after his family surprised him with a cruise for his 90th birthday.

Another person on the cruise was aboard with someone who had started to show signs of memory loss. She said she took the cruise because she wasn’t sure in a year or two if her traveling companion would even be the same person.

So it is fine to have the latest and greatest technology on a ship, hot new entertainers or interesting new shore excursions. Onboard spending credits or free gratuities may be the way to seal the deal if someone is close to making a purchase.

But just as often it is the soft things, the human things, that start passengers thinking about taking a cruise. Cruise lines have started to pick up on this in their advertising, for example in Carnival Cruise Lines’ “Moments That Matter” spots or the Princess Cruises “Come Back New” campaign. They’re definitely not hard sell, but effective in the long run, it seems to me.