With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, various campaigns are starting to appear as brands begin leveraging this annual celebration of love to gain traction with their customers. Most recently notable is a Valentine’s break themed campaign from LastMinute.com, which employs a cheeky, ‘carry on’ style approach to engaging with audiences entirely through the power of visuals.

Narcissism is a trait currently associated with millennials—consider the selfie as a seminal expression of this. For me, self-obsession is an ever-present, and probably healthy state for humans regardless of age and its manifestation goes beyond the age of the selfie, right back to personalisation. It’s a topic about which I’m becoming slightly obsessed myself —I seem to be seeing it everywhere. 

When British Airways launched its Happiness Blanket, it was clear that ‘happiness’ had become an integral part of the brand’s thinking. No wonder, really; marketers and brand experts are well aware that appealing to consumers’ emotional core is one of the surest ways to engender a positive response—and no emotion is as positive as happiness.

But more than that, its approach is based on human truth and carries a pleasant simplicity. Fly with us, it says, and we’ll keep you safe, secure, protected—figuratively as well as literally wrapped up. It highlights that BA thinks of its passengers not as customers, nor as cargo, but as people.