ABOUT

A savvy mix of excellent service, fast trains and customer dedication has helped make Virgin Trains one of the most highly rated rail operators in the UK. But the confusion that surrounded the government’s flawed tender process for the West Coast Mainline in 2012 meant that brand investment had to be paused, leaving passengers uncertain about the future of their favourite train company.

Once the chaos had been cleared up, Virgin Trains wanted to reinvigorate their brand, customer confidence and announce their secured presence in the train travel market. And they wanted to do it in a way that went above and beyond traditional TV advertising and spoke to the genuine customer experiences of their passengers.

We took our detailed knowledge of the train travel experience, worked in the strength and values of the Virgin brand, and created a big idea. One that only Virgin could do – one that captured the feeling you only get when you arrive on a Virgin train: Arrive Awesome.

We implemented this big idea as an integrated and carefully targeted multi-channel campaign, playing on the strengths of different channels to bring the awesome experience to life for customers of all types. All touchpoints played a role in creating this new, customer-focused brand position, from simple banner ads right through to the training of the frontline staff. And it certainly had an impact.

We kicked things off online with ‘The Race to Awesome’, a huge Twitter competition which saw two virtual trains (#TheNorth and #TheSouth) race against each other to ‘AWESOME’. Through social we encouraged people to tweet to power their chosen train to victory, and designed a slick landing page to show live progress of the race – with the first one to arrive winning two of its supporters a year’s unlimited First Class travel. Nice.

Cleverly targeted banners promoted the VT benefits online, and a sexy email announced the awesomeness to the entire customer base.

But telling people we’re awesome was one thing – we needed to be awesome too…

In CRM, we created cheeky re-targeting emails to help customers get the best fares. We got Lionel Richie to present them with a loyalty scheme (kind of). And developed a heavily-personalised pre-departure email to serve up everything they could possibly need for their journey.

People loved it, with thousands tweeting to tell us – so we displayed their kind words on a huge screen at Euston.

We followed up journeys with awesome offers, and devised the rather risqué Virgin Trains Kama Sutra (of booking) to educate everyone how to get the best fares. This went down a storm, with over 30 positive unprompted mentions on Twitter.

‘Arrive Awesome’ became a rallying cry for the whole company and, consequently, the brand realised they shouldn’t just compare themselves to other rail companies, but rather benchmark themselves against the very best customer experience businesses.

Perhaps the most important result was the change in perception towards Virgin Trains – with positive sentiment in social media increasing 3-fold (no mean feat in the world of train travel).

We’d given people a reason to talk about positive experiences where previously they had only shared poor ones.

Most positive comments weren’t even directed at the new positioning, but rather were complimentary about the company as a whole, with people chipping in with their own reasons why Virgin Trains were ‘awesome’.

#ArriveAwesome had a lasting effect on brand perception and buzz too. The hashtag (used in appropriate contexts) reinforced Virgin Trains’ core strengths and provided individuals with an easy way to praise the brand whilst simultaneously saying something positive and self-affirming about themselves.

The figures were pretty good too, with the overall campaign delivering £32million incremental revenue growth – with 10.8k new customers added to the database during the 8-week campaign period, themselves bringing £2.4million additional revenue.

Market share along the London-Birmingham route (where VT have their main competition) rose by 2.7%.

The Race to Awesomeness gained 6,700 Twitter entries (trouncing the 1,000 forecast), and 9m impressions.

All in all – pretty ruddy awesome.