The corporate identity of an airline should “fly” as well as airplanes!
The face of every company is the logo. An airplane decorated with company colors, if it will not fly faster, it will certainly fly more gracefully. Back in World War II, combat airplanes of the Air Force were decorated with menacing toothy images of sharks and outlines of the wings of proud eagles, instilling fear in enemies and courage in allies.
Modern airline logos reflect not only the level of quality of services, but also give civil aircraft a touch of aesthetics – you must agree that it is more pleasant to fly on a bright celestial beauty than on an ordinary corncob with applied identification marks and numbers.
Airline logos should symbolize the main advantages of the company, reflect the main areas of activity (cargo, standard passenger transportation, charter flights, low-costers), and the plane, barely appearing on the landing strip, should guarantee a queue at the reception desk and a desperate crush of passengers when climbing the ramp. Our professional branding agency will create such a style for airplanes that it will be impossible to call them “airplanes”. At least – “bright swallow” or “celestial eagle”. As a maximum – even regular pilots will buy tickets for their own aircraft on a day off to take a ride on their favorite airborne beauty.
The direction of the airline is only upwards!
When designing the visual branding of an airline, it is important to consider the specific line of work. Airlines provide cargo or passenger transportation services. Passenger class is divided into business class, economy class and first class. For large airlines there is a concept of corporate brand and sub-brand – the same airline may have several sub-brands for cargo and passenger transportation. While developing the visual component of the company, it is important to take into account the sphere of activity, as certain directions and classes of air transportation emphasize the customers’ attention on different advantages of services.
For passenger airlines, the following characteristics play a role:
- Ticket price. This factor can be a key one for low-cost companies offering discounted airfare. Low cost of services can attract a large number of customers, especially to popular tourist destinations. If the ticket price is relatively high, competent branding can help justify the higher price or offer customers additional services during the flight, an extended list of daily flights or simplified baggage screening.
- Diversification by class. The same airline may have business and economy class aircraft, as well as provide charter services on specialized premium class aircraft. In addition, the same airplane accommodates seats within different price categories, has several floors, lounges-restaurants and so on.
- The list of services during the flight for different categories of passengers. Some airlines can afford to treat economy class passengers to martinis and olives, while others provide a relatively meager list of services even to first class passengers.
- Professionalism of the staff. For diplomatic flights it would be ridiculous to provide the cabin with a couple of stewardesses – VIPs sometimes require almost personal cooks and masseurs for a comfortable flight. For economy class airplanes several professional stewardesses will be enough. Aircraft coloring rarely has anything in common with the level of professionalism of the crew, but the color of the uniform and the color of the aircraft coloring should be similar within the limits of the company’s corporate identity.
It is worth noting that large airlines have more freedom when it comes to developing their own brand and creative marketing. A budget airline with a few airplanes is unlikely to have sufficient funds for full-scale painting. The very technology of painting “birds of the sky” requires expensive equipment, special paint, and it takes a lot of time to paint, which puts the airplane out of service for several days and costs a lot of money. Such delays have a negative impact on small companies, for which the absence of even one airplane for a week can seriously affect their overall income.
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Creative advertising campaign
To fully develop an airline’s brand, advertising in all information areas is important. It is important to creatively and recognizably present aircraft coloring and provide the company with memorable advertising for stands, billboards, TV or online broadcasting. A comprehensive, integrated and professional rebranding includes not only logo design, aircraft color schemes, staff uniforms and slogans, but also creative commercials or images. The pros at KOLORO can help you create a key visual identity for your airline.
Here are some successful examples of brand promotion of famous airlines:
1. Pacific Airlines. Advertising campaign for the air travel discount season
2. Student Flights. Fly to Australia for the price of 372 cans of beer.
3. Iberia Airlines. “Dandelion branding” of the ease of air travel.
4. “Fall asleep in Tel Aviv, wake up in India.”
As you can see, there are no limits to the creative design of air travel. The limits are only the scope of imagination of creative marketers. When developing a full-scale visual advertising of airlines, all the characteristics of the flight play an important role – from the speed of communication between cities to the level of professionalism of the staff. Even a faster check-in and baggage screening can be a key factor in an effective advertising campaign.
Read also: How creating a brand identity helps to increase the price of your product
Logo development for an airline company
Creative and marketing specialists of our company will provide you with several mind-boggling (considering the average flight altitude of civil aviation, this epithet fits as well as possible) options for the development of the airline’s trademark, reflect in the logo and corporate colors the main advantages of aircrafts. Examples of works and interesting solutions for branding, rebranding and other cool words, understandable only to a little crazy professionals-marketers, you will find on the website of KOLORO company.
So, the company needs to set its planes apart from the countless aluminum civil aviation birds of its competitors. Well, as the pilots say, “First things first, first things first, airplanes first. And the girls? And the girls later.” So, first we will paint the fuselage, and then we will dress up the stewardesses, as marketing experts say.
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The development of corporate identity for an airline company goes through several stages:
- The client provides us with data for an overall assessment of the company’s advantages over its competitors.
- We collect detailed information about the company: the founder’s hometown, country, aircraft manufacturer, previous logos, colors, history of development and everything-anything that can help to maximally display and distinguish the logo and style of the future visual design among competitors. By the way, it is especially hard to do this if your competitors have already been our clients – we do not throw our work to the wind and aerodynamic thrust. But it is always interesting to compete with ourselves.
- We combine all the information we have received and start from scratch to “paint” your company. In some ways it can be like movie detectives: believe me, we will definitely have a separate board with photos, strings and facts about your company – it’s both more visual and more interesting. And in a confusing and creative, a little noisy and crazy process, the best ideas are born.
- When the stage of development of corporate identity and aircraft coloring is ready in several variants, three concepts and generally presented in all its glory, we leave the right of final choice to you.
Our ideas are always cool, creative and a little crazy, which makes us and you stand out from the competition. If you want memorable branding for your own company, contact the industry’s most radio-free, location-locked and bashful specialists – KOLORO.
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