EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN
Everything under the sun
The world's oldest travel brand revamped its visual identity following acquisitions and a dropping share price. Andrew Thomas takes a look inside the new Thomas Cook
Harriet Green advises potential business leaders to follow the conventional route. The 51-year-old CEO of Thomas Cook Group got her job by cutting out the head hunters and cold calling the chairman directly. Now, 15 months into her tenure, she has once again cut out the middle men by bypassing branding consultancies and completing a radical rebrand of the world’s oldest travel company.
When Green took over in July 2012 Thomas Cook group was in a vulnerable place. Debt-laden from a string of expensive acquisitions, the company had been hit hard by the Arab Spring, the middle- East being a key destination choice for many of its customers. Its share price had plummeted to 16p, down from a high of 300p three years earlier. The shares of the once mighty Titan of the travel world were almost junk.
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The inside story How Thomas Cook communicated its rebrand internally is spot on. The trust it demonstrated by trusting 27,000 employees with brand information a fortnight before external release is exemplary. All too often ‘communicate internally first’ is forgotten in the haste to unveil something to press and customers. What Thomas Cook did well was generate excitement among employees and let it radiate from the inside out. Group CEO Harriet Green says, “We made it clear that the new brand is built on our internal values and that the brand unification is another way for us to further embed them as they are the foundation of the brand.” The Sunny Heart brand launch was the third milestone in the company’s transformation this year. It has been through an extraordinarily tough time and the company has recognised the criticality of needing its people to help it “become the company we want to be by delivering our brand promise.” Green says, “Simply, this launch has been described internally as giving a face and personality to the body that we have worked so hard to make fit and healthy again. This has been widely appreciated, not just because it saved on cost, but because it seems more important to employees that the project has been 50 Communicate November 2013 driven by people who understand our business, the travel industry and our customers – it hasn’t been thrust upon us by external consultants.” Developing the brand internally with employees was smart. Not only did it save on cost, but involving them – the experts – means it was created by people who really understand the business. I applaud the planned and sustained comms plan and the way it equipped leaders to have face-to-face, two-way conversations. Maintaining momentum is key and it’s refreshing to see this recognised in the ongoing comms plans. A sign of success is not only the fact that it didn’t leak, but seeing photographs of employees on launch day. They chose to come to work in heart-branded clothing, in corporate colours and shared their stories via personal social media accounts. The reason it was a success is because it was authentic - real people sharing real stories about what the launch meant to them, having been trusted implicitly by the organisation. Well done to all involved. Rachel Miller, internal communication and social media strategist and director, All Things IC. Her interview with group CEO of Thomas Cook Harriet Green is featured on www. allthingsic.com. |
Green has been a transforming CEO. Within months, she had replaced most of the Thomas Cook board, axed 2,500 jobs, finished a major capital refinancing project and started a disposal process of of non-core businesses. The city loves her – her year anniversary at the helm of Thomas Cook coincided with a near tenfold increase in its share price.
Her latest transformation project has been the Thomas Cook brand itself. Central to the new brand is a new ‘sunny heart’ visual identity, replacing the globe logo that has existed in some form since the company was founded in 1841, but running in its current iteration from 2001. The visual identity itself was not designed in-house and had already been trialled prior to its global adoption. Created by Swedish branding agency Happy last August it had already been considered successful in the unification of three of Thomas Cook’s Nordic brands; Sweden’s Ving, Finland’s Tjaereborg and Spies from Denmark.
Feedback and customer research from the Nordic rebrand was very positive. Simplification of the brand hierarchy was a priority for Green – she had promised investors that cost savings would come from this process - and she took a strong leadership role in developing a new brand strategy. She gathered a group of marketing heads from around the world to begin work on the rebrand. From the outset it was decided to run the programme in-house.
One of those involved in the process was Martin Dyhouse, head of brand, sales and marketing for Thomas Cook. Unapologetic on eschewing the use of external consultants, he explained “We knew the product better and we knew the transformation we need to take better than anyone else. We felt we were in a better position to drive things forward and come up with the brand
strategy from an internal perspective.” The global brand took the ‘Sunny Heart’ visual identity. But central to the brand strategy was increasing the promise to stakeholders. According to
Green “The new brand isn’t just a rollout of a new logo, it’s about a promise. What we’ve announced is a renewed promise to our customers, our people and suppliers. A promise that we’re putting them at the heart of our transformation it’s the essence of who we are.”
Green adopted a new strapline to the brand. “Let’s go” will replace the old, “Don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it.” According to Dyhouse, “The concept behind the new slogan is that the brand essence renews confidence and inspires personal journeys by the trusted pioneers in global travel.”
The aspect of promise seems important to Thomas Cook. Adding to Green’s comments, Dyhouse states that the new brand is designed to encourage trust again in the company. “We want to give confidence to our customers, and that will come from this creation of groupness.”
The new brand was tested in front of focus groups in the UK and Germany. The overwhelming response was positive. The next stage was to introduce the new brand to the senior management team. Green gathered together the 150 global brand managers for a brand workshop. Again the process was seen as successful. “Within any community there are those who don’t like change, but everyone understood the reasons why we were doing it” says Dyhouse.
After Green introduced the new brand, the senior team focused on the promises that brands make and how to deliver them before focusing on the new Thomas Cook values of groupness and trust. The senior management team then went back to their markets and explained the new brand to the rest of the company. Within a month the entire organisation was familiar with the new brand and the company was ready to go public with their new promise.
The majority of Thomas Cook companies have taken the new brand, but not all. The group brand and the Thomas Cook master brand just consist of the new identity and company name. Others, such as Ving and Tjaereborg are aligned brands with the new visual identity appearing directly with their name. Airtours and a number of other companies are endorsed by the new brand, with their logos remaining and the strapline ‘part of the Thomas Cook group’ and logo appearing below. Where companies need to distance themselves from the group, such as Club 18-30, the new visual identity has not been adopted.
Although Thomas Cook say that managing the rebrand programme internally saved money, they are quick to point out that cost was not central to that process. “The priority of the rebrand was making sure that we had the right positioning, the right brand essence and the right brand identity but we had to keep one eye on the bank balance” says Dyhouse.
However, the implementation of the rebrand was not introduced overnight. “We definitely saw it as a roll-out rather than a launch, because that’s the best way to minimise costs.”
This gradual roll-out is unlikely to be completed until all brand collateral is used up. Quick (and cheaper) fixes like websites have all had the new brand introduced, but Thomas Cook insist that all brochures need to be used up before being replaced with the new brand. Likewise aircraft and other vehicles will only be updated in line with their existing maintenance schedule.
The new brand was unveiled on October 3. Reactions were mixed. The mainstream media was generally positive, yet many bloggers from the branding community heaped scorn on the new ‘sunny heart’ visual identity. The question is whether this criticism was justified or a reaction of Thomas Cook’s decision to run the rebrand in-house. According to Dyhouse, the mix of sentiment was affirmation that they’d taken the right route. “There will always be some who come out of the woodwork within the industry, branding agencies saying this is what happens when clients look after their work. I wouldn’t talk about clients that way and effectively it’s given me a list of agencies I wouldn’t work with in the future.”
Peer reviews
Simon Manchipp, founder and executive strategic creative director, SomeOne
The new branding of Thomas Cook needs to be a crowd pleaser. It is the ITV of travel brands. Mass market. Loud, proud and primetime. And this is no small gesture from the £9.4 billion business – the rebrand will be complex to implement and will require a small army to police. (They have over a million staff globally so that should be fun).
They are clearly up for change – this is not a tweak or twiddle by a bored but well connected internal team. HappyF&B, the team behind the rebrand, have created charming work for other companies (like Liseberg for example); yet here they have been corralled into creating an optimistic looking, but limited, system for the travel leviathan.
I applaud businesses who embrace change. Commissioning new creative work is a terrifying prospect for most – it’s bad enough getting a builder in to create an extension – let alone an architect to strategically change the behavior of an entire organisation. But when you play within rules that have long expired, you move from the potential of space travel to the reality of flying a kite with hairy string.
I hope that the HappyF&B crew will be re-engaged by CEO Harriet Green to expand this logo-centric approach into what we at SomeOne call a ‘BrandWorld’ – a series of interconnected assets that enable all channels to join up and create brands that occupy a near monopolistic status. That’s the true test of a brand – to be chosen above others and to charge a premium for it. Something Thomas Cook will be desperate to do as they race to the bottom of discounted mass tourism.
Come on Thomas, bring us an entertaining escape from the everyday, not another blindly optimistic logo.
Tony Beresford, creative director, scarlettabbott
Approaching this type of work as designers, there is always an internal desire to break away from the incumbent and to produce something that sits head and shoulders above its predecessor – to do something different.
As responsible communicators however, our aim must surely be to not push things too far and to avoid alienating a customer base that has come to trust a brand identity and what it stands for.
I think both boxes have been thoroughly ticked here. Brands need to evolve and progress in order to stay fresh and relevant to their markets. Sometimes that evolution can come in the form of minor changes, or in giant leaps. To stay recognisable, there must always be something that remains true to what came before – otherwise we may as well change everything, the name included.
From an employee engagement perspective it’s interesting that Thomas Cook have been vocal about the identity being designed in house. One would like to think that this is a reflection of a desire for involvement and co-creation – for its colleagues, who will ultimately be the ones charged with delivering the brand promise, to be involved in creating it in the first place.
Thomas Cook have made a truly giant leap and have produced a new identity that sits lightyears away from the old version, but it has done so with great thought and care. The work represents a very natural progression and the fact that the yellows, gradients and typeface have remained fairly unchanged means that they act as clear indicators to the brand’s hard-fought value and long built trust factor.
