Most of the time, we have only a couple of goals in mind when we’re one a plane: Just get there with all of our stuff and try not to lose our minds with boredom.
Fortunately, most airlines now give us a selection of things to watch as we while away the hours. But even when they didn’t, many of us still kept to ourselves and tried not to get into each other’s way.
Still, it’s not impossible to make what Fight Clubcalled “single serving friends.”
You actually find someone you can have a pleasant conversation with for the whole flight and lowkey miss them when it’s over. It’s rare, but it happens. However, Delta and Coca-Cola recently learned that this phenomenon isn’t something that anyone can force to happen.
In late January, passengers started tweeting about napkins encouraging passengers to try their luck with their “plane crushes.”
According to Insider , the napkins were part of a long-standing brand partnership between Coca-Cola and Delta and they also provided space to write down your name and phone number.
Coca-Cola has successfully used a personal touch to market their products many times in the past.
A quick look back at their “Share a Coke” campaign says it all — the right level of intimacy with customers can skyrocket sales like never before. In that case, it bumped their sales by 2.5% after a decade of declines, according to Adweek .
Then again, a misstep in marketing can be completely disastrous for companies as big as Coca Cola — take Pepsi’s 2017 campaign for example.
The company saw massive backlash to a commercial featuring Kendall Jenner as the protagonist in a police protest narrative, and ultimately cancelled the entire campaign after apologizing.
So where did this napkin debacle land on a scale from “Share a Coke” to “Cancelled Kendall Jenner?”
Well, it seems to be just polarizing enough to divide the internet, and have people angry-tweeting their opinions.
Let’s just get this out there first — there were definitely some level-headed people in the mix.
Some being the key word in that sentence. Once you get past the normies, it gets a little more ridiculous.
Which seems like an appropriate reaction to a napkin that says, “you’re on a plane full of a interesting people and hey, you never know.”
Interesting as they may be, though, some of the people who came across these napkins did know something for sure: They wanted nothing to do with what they were laying down.
One Twitter user, @ducksauz, called the napkins “creepy AF.”
As they tweeted , “Pretty sure no one appreciated unsolicited phone numbers in the ‘good old days’ and they sure as heck don’t want the number of someone who has been gawking at them on a plane for hours today.”
Another user agreed, with the allowance that any creepy factor was likely unintentional.
After all, it isn’t like there’s never been a case where people entered a relationship after meeting on a plane. However, most of us are about as likely to sit next to somebody we can tolerate, at best.
At the same time, other users didn’t appear to share in these passengers’ discomfort.
For them, the reaction to something that they considered a non-issue inspired more eye rolling than the napkins themselves.
Some also seemed to think the negative reactions weren’t genuine.
For another user, the idea of closely examining a dating site profile seemed more creepy than anything the napkins were suggesting.
And if two people are lucky enough to hit it off on a plane and even luckier in that they somehow aren’t headed to entirely different parts of the world, more power to them.
At the same time, it can be pretty awkward spending several hours packed next to somebody in a metal tube that you can’t leave.
And nothing makes that discomfort hit critical mass quicker than passing a note like this only to discover that your plane crush isn’t into it at all. That’s guaranteed to be a long flight.
At least with a dating app, you can swipe away the folks you don’t like.
Regardless of who found the napkins creepy and who didn’t, however, neither Delta nor Coca-Cola were interested in pressing the issue.
As a Delta representative told Insider, “We rotate Coke products regularly as part of our brand partnership, but missed the mark with this one. We are sorry for that and began removing the napkins from our aircraft in January.”
For their part, a Coca-Cola spokesperson also apologized, saying, “We sincerely apologize to anyone we may have offended. We worked with our partners at Delta to begin removing the napkins last month and are replacing them with other designs.”
h/t Insider
