2015 Gold Best Brand Building Campaign

TMW Unlimited

Virgin Trains

Arrive Awesome

The Team

Virgin knew it needed to give more than just rational reasons to get on board – it needed to strengthen its brand and increase customer advocacy by making the entire Virgin Trains experience awesome right from booking to boarding and beyond.

Arrive Awesome brought home brilliant results, growing Virgin Trains’ market share as well as revenue and delivering huge campaign engagement and positive brand sentiment.

Strategy

While excellent service, fast trains and customer dedication had made Virgin Trains one of the most highly rated rail operators in the UK, the government’s flawed tender process for the West Coast Mainline in 2012 put brand investment on pause. Virgin Trains now needed to reinforce customer confidence in its brand and long-term presence in the market.

The team combined the values of the Virgin brand with a detailed knowledge of train travel to express a feeling you could only get when you arrive on a Virgin train: Arrive Awesome.

This big idea became a carefully targeted integrated campaign. The strengths of different channels, from simple banner ads through to training of frontline staff, were used to bring the awesome experience to life for all customer types and nurture a new, more customer-focused brand position.

Creativity

A huge Twitter competition, The Race to Awesome, kicked off the campaign with two virtual trains racing against each other to ‘AWESOME’, driven by public tweets using hashtags #TheNorth and #TheSouth. A slick landing page showed live race progress, and two of the quickest train’s supporters won a year’s unlimited First Class travel. Cleverly targeted banners promoted Virgin Trains’ benefits online, while emails announced its awesomeness to the whole customer base.

In CRM, cheeky re-targeting emails and a risqué Virgin Trains Kama Sutra (of booking) helped customers get the best fares, and Lionel Richie presented a loyalty scheme. Heavily personalised pre-departure emails served everything customers could need for their journey, while post-trip emails delivered awesome offers. People loved it, so Virgin Trains displayed their kind tweets on a huge screen at Euston.

Results

The perception of Virgin Trains greatly improved, with positive sentiment in social media up three-fold – no mean feat in the world of train travel. People talked about positive experiences where they had previously only shared poor ones. Most comments were complimentary about the company as a whole, not just the campaign, with people contributing their own reasons why Virgin Trains were ‘awesome’.

Arrive Awesome became a rallying cry for the whole company, with the brand realising it shouldn’t just compare itselves to other rail companies, but rather benchmark against the very best customer experience businesses.

The Race to Awesome gained 6,700 entries and nine million impressions, while the campaign delivered £32 million incremental revenue growth, nearly 11,000 additional customer profiles and a 2.7% market share increase.