From the airline to the customer
In March 2012 Lufthansa changed the way it spoke to the world. The carrier retired "There's no better way to fly" and introduced "Nonstop you," a claim developed by the Hamburg agency Kolle Rebbe, which had won the brief in a pitch shortly before Christmas 2011. The launch came with a reworked visual language, a teaser campaign in the daily press handled by the media agency Mindshare, and, for the first time, Lufthansa advertising in the commercial breaks of the major television networks.
The grammar of the new line told the whole story. The old claim had been about the airline. The new one was about the passenger. Where "There's no better way to fly" asserted Lufthansa's superiority, "Nonstop you" promised undivided attention to the individual traveller, the sense that the entire operation existed to serve the person in the seat.
Why the old claim had to go
The decision to replace the slogan came from the top of the marketing organisation. Hubert Frach, Lufthansa's Vice President Marketing, together with Benita Struve, who led brand management and advertising, had briefed the agencies with an explicit request for a new claim. The reason was strategic. "There's no better way to fly" had come to feel too elitist, too much a message delivered from above, for the brand Lufthansa now wanted to be.
That brand was broader than the one the previous claim had addressed. Lufthansa had long been shaped around the male-dominated world of business travel, a carrier for the performance-minded rather than a means of getting to a holiday. The company wanted to change that. To become more profitable in a fiercely contested industry, Frach and his team set out to speak far more directly to private travellers as well as to their core of business flyers.
According to Andreas Winter-Buerke, managing director of consulting at Kolle Rebbe and the lead on the new account, the aim was to show Lufthansa not as a premium carrier for the performance-oriented, but as the quality airline for everyone.
A quality airline for all
"Nonstop you" was built to carry that wider invitation. Families, retirees and young couples were now part of the audience, alongside the frequent business traveller who had always been at the centre of the brand. The claim positioned Lufthansa as approachable, an airline you could almost reach out and touch, without abandoning the promise of quality that the crane had always signalled. The customer, not the company, was the subject of the sentence.
The supporting work reinforced the shift. A modified image language softened the brand's tone, and the move into mainstream television advertising signalled that Lufthansa wanted to be seen by, and to speak to, a general public rather than a narrow segment. The teaser phase in the daily newspapers introduced the new claim before the full campaign arrived, giving the change a deliberate, staged rollout.
The wording itself did double duty. In aviation, a nonstop flight is the most direct connection between two points, the premium option that needs no change of plane. "Nonstop you" borrowed that vocabulary and turned it inward, suggesting not only the convenience of a direct route but an uninterrupted focus on the passenger. The phrase let Lufthansa keep a hint of its premium heritage while recasting it as a service to the individual.
Pressure from every side
The repositioning was a response to real competitive pressure. On short and medium-haul routes, low-cost carriers such as Ryanair and easyJet, along with Lufthansa's own subsidiary Germanwings, had been gaining ground and resetting customer expectations about price. On long-haul routes, the Gulf carriers Emirates, Qatar Airways and Etihad were growing stronger year by year, competing hard on product and service. Lufthansa was being squeezed at both ends of its network.
Frach was careful not to frame the situation as a crisis. Asked about the competition, he insisted that no one at Lufthansa was afraid, that the airline faced large challenges but rested on a strong, compelling brand that stood for very good quality. The task, as he described it, was to communicate that positioning convincingly to passengers and potential customers. "Nonstop you" was the instrument chosen for that job.
The claim marked a turning point in how Lufthansa talked about itself. It moved the brand from assertion to attention, from a statement of rank to a promise of focus on the traveller. The line would later give way to "Say yes to the world," but the underlying direction it set, away from the airline and toward the person flying, would shape Lufthansa's communication for years to come.
Source: Jeuxtesblier Youtube
