A veteran cruise attendee at just 24 years old, Julia Wilcox is used to her inbox flooding with promotional emails from cruise lines courting loyal customers. But Wilcox, who vlogs her cruise experiences on TikTok, said one cruise line takes a more idiosyncratic approach to their marketing: Two or three times a month, she’ll get thick and glossy paper envelopes in the mail from Viking Cruises, the luxury cruise line which with she took a 10-day trip in January 2023. It’s the only cruise company that sends her paper mail—and it does so persistently.
“I get so much paper mail from Viking. I’m like, this is insane,” she told Fortune. “You could send me on a free cruise for the amount of paper and things that you send me.”
While anomalous in its marketing strategy, the logic behind Viking’s insistence on sending snail mail makes more sense after Wilcox, a Gen Z TikToker, admitted she’s not the company’s target audience. In fact, she was four decades younger than the cruise guests’ median age of 60 or 70. That’s just how Viking wants it.
“They’re the richest group we have around,” Viking CEO Torstein Hagen said in a May 1 CNBC Squawk on the Street interview. “They have the money; they have the time.”
Hagen, who at 81 surpasses his baby boomer target audience, has tailored the cruise to the tastes of the older demographic that holds 70% of the country’s disposable income. There are no kids under 18 allowed, and no casinos aboard. Instead, Viking’s line of 92 vessels—traveling to all seven continents and employing a staff of 10,000—offers walking tours of European cities and cheese tastings.
“It’s a quite serene environment for people up in their ages,” Hagen said, “and for curious people who want to go to destinations, not [who want] to go on waterslides and the like.”
Hagen’s strategy has certainly worked thus far. Viking, with a $10.4 billion valuation, raised $1.5 billion in its initial public offering on May 1, the highest of any company this year. Per an SEC filing from last month, Viking experienced 14.4% growth from 2015 to 2023, the biggest leap of any luxury river or ocean cruise during that period.
“We have a very, very clear focus, and that is reflected in all our customer ratings, the rewards we get, and so forth,” Hagen told CNBC. “It doesn’t make us as large as the others, but it certainly makes us more attractive to the consumer.”
Viking did not…
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