Aer Lingus and Lippincott talk brand strategy at Dublin Travel Massive

We spoke to Aer Lingus and design agency Lippincott about how they found the right new brand for Ireland’s flag-carrier airline, and what they learned along the way.

This recap is written by Kevin O’Shaughnessy, Dublin Travel Massive leader, and co-founder of CityHook — a travel platform for airport connections.

Dublin Travel Massive  — in partnership with Deem — hosted an evening event featuring their design heroes at Huckletree on November 7.

Kevin spoke to Head of Digital for Aer Lingus, Dara McMahon and Lee Coomber, a senior partner in design agency Lippincott about how to rebuild and airline brand.

🎙 Listen to the live talk on the Travel Massive Podcast — Episode 31

Curating the Aer Lingus brand

Aer Lingus was the state-owned flag-carrier for Ireland before joining the IAG group with Vueling, British Airways and Iberia. The name of the airline is adapted from the Irish expression for “air fleet”, and doesn’t really convey the fact that it’s an Irish airline.

This has created some design challenges through the years, and Lee Coomber from Lippincott talked about some of the challenges in linking the “Irish” identity to the airline with the shamrock. Lee refers to this as a process of “curating” the elements that were there already.

This would suggest that one of the biggest stakeholders for the brand is now the Irish the world over. According to Lee, “there is no shamrock design that exists that hasn’t been done”.

Design iteration

Their team worked with Aer Lingus to iterate through 50 different designs of the shamrock to find the perfect one.

Dara McMahon, the head of Digital from Aer Lingus who ran the project refers to a number of testing processes that they have used along the way, including focus groups in 6 key markets, internal reviews and more.

Lippincott have designed the Aer Lingus livery twice (once in 1974, once in 2019) but also the recent Delta Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and other great airline brands and airplane colour schemes (known as livery) as well as household brands such as Unilever, Ikea and Starbucks.

Fonts matter

Dara has a very rationalised view of how to each element of the brand performs. Like at her main launch presentation, she explained that “the size of font on the fuselage” matters when positioning an airline, demonstrating a scale between Lufthansa and (now defunct) Wow Air for example.

Similarly, the amount of colour used can give the same indicator to passengers. Too much colour means that the airline is a low-cost carrier; too little means premium.

In her presentation she went through just how exactly they struck the right balance between the two.

Lippincott found a colour combination that allows a light green shamrock to really stand out while providing a palette which can be used throughout the guest experience — teal.

Reaction

You can’t iterate an airline brand until you find one that works. As Lee puts it, you need to make the right scale of a statement: too little change means that the effort is ignored. Too much can shock.

Great design projects come from aligning business goals and brand goals: a new brand is the start of a new dialog, and in airline terms, this often means refreshing every touch-point from wing-tip to wing-tip.

Similarly, the durability of the brand comes from its simplicity. In modern terms, brands tend to last 7 years; for airlines, this is usually 15-20 years.

Emotional design

As Lee puts it, emotion is key. Brands are successful if they make an emotional connection. They’ll only do this if you put emotion in. Their agency has found that these emotional connections can lead to 11% higher economic performance. At the same time, you need a samurai spirit to keep emotion in control.

An open debate can be deadly to a branding project. As Dara puts it, the internal employees were sampled but not polled for their opinion. Of course, we have to remember that at most organisations, the current branding is usually a matter of great pride, defended daily by staff.

Overall, the reaction was positive; Dara had prepared for the worst, but was delighted to learn how well-received the brand became.

See Dara’s original presentation at the launch event below —

Highlight video and Travel Massive Podcast

Watch the recap video below —

Listen to the podcast —

Special thanks…

Thanks to Deem (a travel technology company based in California who have just opened a new development center in Dublin) for sponsoring and making this event possible, and their CEO John Rizzo for attending.

Thanks to the Dublin Travel Massive team for producing the event — Kevin O’Shaughnessy of CityHook and Mark Lenahan of Travelport Digital with support from Amanda Campbell of Farelogix and Tahnee Perry of Deem.

Thanks to Michael Collins and Niamh Waters of TravelMedia for event support. Photography by Rafal Kostrzewa. Recap video by Leslie Graham.

And of course the Dublin Travel Massive community, for attending!

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