IRELAND/INTERNATIONAL. Aer Rianta International (ARI) has launched a new corporate and consumer-facing brand identity, including an updated logo and brand expression, ‘Joy On Your Way’.
It is officially introduced today, 22 February, through a branded makeover of The Moodie Davitt Report website, alongside celebrations at company headquarters in Dublin and across ARI’s global markets.
The culmination of over 18 months of strategic development, ARI said that its new brand “creates a further point of difference” for the travel retailer. The company said that it demonstrates “a unique brand proposition that has not been seen before in the industry, harnessing the power of human connection across all aspects of the business”.
ARI put the theme of ‘joy’ front and centre of its thinking – taking into account the fact that airports are places of emotion, with humanity at its most expressive and intense, and recognising the role of shopping and other services in influencing traveller experiences.
‘Joy On Your Way’ represents a “human” customer proposition and an upbeat, positive alignment with ARI’s brand values. Importantly too, it is distinctive to ARI in travel retail while offering scope for creativity and expression both in B2B and B2C channels.
ARI Chief Executive Officer Ray Hernan said: “This is not just about modernising the logo, the look, the colour; it’s reaffirming our commitment around what our vision is – to be the world’s favourite airport retailer and partner of choice. And it’s about backing that up in a very distinct way.”
Click on the video above for an engaging introduction to the new ARI branding
Building ‘joy’ into the strategy
ARI senior management said the company set out a number of key goals with the rebranding drive. This included developing and articulating a cohesive and clear brand strategy that would inform not just its activity but behaviour too, acting as a “charter” to colleagues and stakeholders in the business.
To reach this launch stage, the company engaged with internally and with partners externally, to audit its branding up to that point, assess how it communicated and complete a competitive review.
Defining ARI’s corporate ‘DNA’ was a next key step, in which the focus was on values and behaviours, expression, ‘tone of voice’ and B2B and B2C brand architecture.
The strategy, once decided, then came to life at corporate and B2C level, with communications and a clear toolkit agreed.
ARI is now beginning a major roll-out of its brand expression both internally and externally. A key ambition, it noted, is to create a “reinvigorated, fit for purpose’ B2C brand that integrates ‘Joy On Your Way’ at multiple touchpoints.
Delivering joy
On emphasising ‘joy’ as its “secret sauce”, ARI said: “Joy is a fundamental, universal feeling that transcends cultures and borders. Joy is spread through human connection, from unexpected surprises to bringing a smile to someone’s face. Joy is a feeling associated with travel, exploration and retail. And joy is what ARI is committed to delivering.”
Visually, ARI describes its new brand as “dynamic and energetic, bold and confident – reflective of a modern progressive travel retailer with ambitious growth plans”. The new logo has been crafted to create a subtle sense of movement, while the new primary colour palette, which includes a new core red, features a contemporary gradient to add “vibrancy and energy,” it added.
The company also sought to bring out expressions of its corporate personality, with its design principles following from this, with the new branding adding emotion and being “charismatic, self-assured and distinctive”.
For the first time, ARI is aligning its B2B and B2C brand worlds, delivering a thread of consistency across the business for customers, partners and colleagues.
The new expression will be delivered through its Customer Value Proposition (CVP), which in turn is built around a number of key principles: savings & value; the best brands; gifting; exciting experiences; exceptional customer service; convenience; hyperconnectivity; Sense of Place; a safe environment and sustainability. The CVP aims to deliver joy by removing barriers and enhancing the retail experience through innovative global initiatives, said the company.
It will also be delivered through the culture and commitment of its organisation and its global teams, As part of this new brand launch and cementing its commitment to delivering joy, ARI has appointed Paula Pryor as Chief Joy Ambassador to the business.
She is tasked with ensuring that ‘joy’ is lived across all aspects of the business – from the day-to-day working environment through to training in delivering best-in-class customer service (see panel).
| “We’re serious about joy” – ARI Chief Joy Ambassador Paula Pryor Under its pledge to deliver joyful experiences through its updated vision and mission statement, Chief Joy Ambassador Paula Pryor will be “responsible for ensuring that joy is lived across every part of our business,” said ARI (see also video and graphic on this page). “We’re serious about joy,” said Pryor. “We are committed to pushing boundaries, doing things a little differently and doing what we do best. “Joy is a special feeling; it’s delight, it’s the unexpected surprises, it’s about making a human connection.” Her key responsibilities include:
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“I am delighted to unveil the results of many months of extensive work in developing ARI’s new brand identity and brand expression”, said ARI Global Head of Marketing Laura Toner.
“We’re breathing a new energy into our business as well as into the industry. Our brand is now one of our strongest assets. It’s charmingly confident, relatably human and powerfully emotive – exactly what we are as a business.
“As well as embodying this through our corporate brand, this is also expressed through our new consumer-facing brand identity, meaning as a business we are fully aligned in our brand communication.
“In-store and digitally, we have a new creative experience for our customers with vibrant and engaging branding. It’s clear and simple, highlighting all that is great about ARI and the travel retail experience, from great value and savings to travel retail exclusives. We’re excited to really elevate our offering and welcome customers into this new brand world.”
Chief Joy Ambassador Paula Pryor commented: “As travel retailers we have such an important and unique role to play in the passenger journey by creating moments of joy. Airports are uniquely home to all spectrums of human emotion, but at ARI we don’t just observe – we are active orchestrators of joy for passengers.
“I am so excited to work with our amazing teams to bring Joy On Your Way to life across the business, with a clearly defined roadmap to achieve our company vision.”
Chief Commercial Officer and Deputy CEO Anthony Kenny added: “Our relationship with our customers and our partners is not simply transactional; it is emotional. We understand their needs and their challenges, and our Customer Value Proposition was created to address these needs and challenges; it is our formula for joy.
“And of course, it is our people who deliver on our CVP and make Joy On Your Way a reality. We have pioneered travel retail for over 75 years – we’re now elevating our industry once again by showing the importance of human connection in all that we do.”
“This marks a gear change for our business,” added Ray Hernan. “Not only are we identifying our unique proposition, brand values and behaviours, we’re embracing and celebrating them.
“It provides a distinctive proposition and a further point of difference from our competitors; it makes us the business that people want to work with, and we have the track record to prove it. We’re serious about joy, and we’re serious about driving growth.”
Q&A
Shortly before the launch, The Moodie Davitt Report President Dermot Davitt met with ARI CEO Ray Hernan, Chief Commercial Officer and Deputy CEO Anthony Kenny and Global Marketing Director Laura Toner to discuss the thinking behind the rebranding, and about the “modern and confident” ARI that it represents.
The Moodie Davitt Report: How do you sum up the significance of the rebranding for ARI, and how it ties in with the company’s strategy, direction and culture?
Ray Hernan: In the context of our 75-year-plus history, this is a defining moment. It is not every day that you change your branding and the last time we updated the logo was in 2011. So it is definitely a landmark in that context for our business.
For me, it’s not just about modernising the logo, the look, the colour; it’s reaffirming our commitment around what our vision is – to be the world’s favourite airport retailer and partner of choice. And it’s about backing that up in a very distinct way.
It’s also a sign of confidence in ARI that we are presenting a new, vibrant, energetic brand.
It gives us an overall framework for everyone to get behind. Because like any type of strategy, it has to be delivered. And it will only be successful if this whole proposition around our new brand resonates with our people.
We have been creating a mindset within our teams or culture over the past couple of years to make sure that we are creative, innovative, professional. What we had to do here was to remain authentic, and true to our strong values and beliefs.
The previous expression, ‘Experience is Everything’, worked well for a long time. Was it time to go beyond that messaging?
Ray Hernan: That proposition stood us in good stead for many years. But the feeling when we spoke to people internally and externally was that there was something missing. Our feeling, especially after COVID, was that the airport can still be a stressful experience, and we can help bring joy back to the journey. It’s very simple as an idea but it encapsulates what we want to do.
To put it another way, we’re never going to launch a loyalty programme. It doesn’t make sense for us. For me, the best way of communicating and getting belief in a brand is word of mouth. If you have got people that have gone through our airport and have had a great experience, through that delivery of ‘joy on your way’, then people are going to be told about it, and they will come back. So you will get that loyalty through the experience, and that emotional attachment will have huge resonance for our team too.
So really this is more evolution than revolution, updating the branding to mirror where the business is today?
Ray Hernan: Yes. Through COVID, we, like others, took a step back and looked at our business. We reassessed what ARI stands for, we updated our strategy, but we were still missing something over-arching that would join the dots. So the branding and what it says is really the glue that connects our vision, mission and purpose.
So this gives affirmation to our values and behaviours. This brand launch is about maximising the performance of our existing business, delivered through our CVP. And it also provides a shop window so that our existing business can also extend to new business. It also helps our business development, and allows us communicate our track record.
Internally, it will resonate right down through everything we do, from recruitment and training, finding the right people with the right mindset, then living that every day of the week. It will be measurable through our new customer satisfaction programme and ‘joy’ will be part of the performance of our teams.
Travel retail is a business but it should be more than just transactional. It’s about the connection that our whiskey ambassadors make, that our front of house teams make, what we do internally at all levels. We put the customer first and we are clear on this. But it’s not only about customers, it’s how we work with our partner airports and brands on a human level. We have difficult discussions as everyone does, but we show respect and we engage at a human level once that discussion is over.
What has been the reaction of your teams to the new branding? Any challenges in communicating this internally?
Ray Hernan: We have had many focus groups external and internal. I’m delighted to see the energy, the motivation and how people have related to it. We are certain that this is right for us, and giving that emotional connection to what we do.
We put a lot of effort into recruiting people into the organisation with the right mindset, retaining existing people, but in retail it has never been as difficult as it is now. So creating the right environment, the right attitude, environment, culture, beliefs and behaviours is vital.
The way ARI is evolving is that we have a fantastic mix of people, young and old, experienced and new. But we are also straddling so many different cultures and markets, more than many other operators. And this is why it’s so important that we have a kind of a backbone of living those values, showing respect to each other, always looking to be better.
Laura Toner: What’s important here is that this wasn’t just the marketing team going off and creating a new brand, this was built in collaboration with our teams around the world, with other stakeholders too who understand us well.
What does the rebrand mean for how you engage the end consumer?
Laura Toner: We have overhauled our B2C brand world so that the thread of joy will run through our consumer-facing brand.
We did a huge piece of research over the last 18 months in terms of great savings and value, where we looked at what this means to passengers from all corners of the globe, how they understand our communications, how we can achieve better conversion and how we can simplify our message.
Cyprus has been a pilot in executing what we learned so our store now looks completely different, visually, from a communications point of view. It is flexible but simple too. We know that passengers need to see the savings clearly within three seconds or else they are gone. And we know from research that five of the top ten reasons people don’t shop is savings or value.
So our marketing teams have new KPIs with the new campaigns and we aim to achieve greater conversion on campaign versus last year. That will all be monitored in terms of consumer impact.
How does this new look and branding help set ARI apart from your travel retail peers in the international market?
Ray Hernan: Well, first we see this as hugely important in linking our B2B brand and our B2C brand. This is something we were all challenged with. To win new business (B2B) you need to demonstrate a very strong B2C proposition. We might not always have been aligned in that messaging across these two audiences. Now we have clear messaging.
More and more, airports are asking what are the non-financial attributes you can bring to the table? So we have to bring that brand promise, tell a story and bring it all to life in our existing operations.
We are bespoke, we are not cookie-cutter, and no two of our stores are the same.
Anthony Kenny: We are reemphasising our heritage and our tradition, but at the same time we are continually innovating and challenging ourselves.
We are reinforcing the human and emotional connection that ARI has with its customers and as partners, and dialling up the fact that we are a really good business and a really good company to do business with.
We feel that with other travel retail brands, their language is quite functional. We don’t talk enough as an industry about the fun and excitement that travel retail should represent. We are leaning right into that here. So joy has to mean unanticipated surprise, emotion, making the customer smile, creating a human connection.
And ARI does this well. When we researched this project, one thing that customers, partners and staff came back to was that we had a distinct ability to connect on a human and an emotional level. That brand personality is what we are bringing to life.
Do you feel that the post-COVID era is an opportune time to introduce this new branding?
Laura Toner: It’s not lost on us that coming out of the pandemic, travellers experience a lot more stress so there’s an opportunity for us to provide moments of delight. That means introducing theatre, surprise, experience.
That also comes to life with the brands, with which we have shared these plans. We are working on exciting plans with some of them to create moments of retail theatre on the shop floor and bring activations to life. It is a focus for the heads of category to instil joy through retail theatre.
So the engagement of our teams is vital but they need to have the right product and in making this all come to life in the stores, the brands are hugely important. That means being the launch pad for newness, for being the best-in-class option for them as they bring new lines to market.
How will all of these statements about ambition, alongside the new branding, translate into business performance this year and beyond, do you hope?
Ray Hernan: If you deliver the right service and the right environment, that drives the financial performance. If you encapsulate what the customer wants, that’s how you do better as a business.
All of these initiatives we undertake through our CVP also have to make commercial sense, whether it’s e-lockers or our digital strategy or the candy bot we introduced recently in Cyprus Duty Free.
Ultimately for me, you look at conversion rates in travel retail compared to domestic, and only one in four makes a purchase – that is shocking when you have a captive audience. Now we know shopping is not the priority for most at the airport so we need to engage better. And the success of this plan will be seen in how many more people we will have buying in our stores.
Looking at 2022, it was a bridge year towards recovery. It was a good year for ARI, reflecting by the fantastic shot in the arm we received by winning in Portugal.
The performance in 2022 has reaffirmed our commitment and focus on growing the business. We are confident. We came though COVID well, we are financially strong, we spent wisely, we cut costs when we had and now it’s about building for success. This is a sign of our confidence, We are out there bidding selectively, while maximising our existing business.
We are investing in our stores and in how we retain and recruit our people. That means we need to train, mentor and support them, and create an environment where people are very happy. Our ESG strategy and culture is hugely important.
Can you sum up how you would like your industry partners on one hand and consumers on the other to view ARI through the prism of your new branding? What do you hope to achieve?
Ray Hernan: We want to show that we understand how to connect with the customer in a way that ultimately drives spend and delivers a better return for us and our partners. That the airports see it as adding to the passenger experience, and also that brands and airports see ARI as the best partner to do business with.
That’s what we aim to do every day. This rebranding reaffirms that goal, it will embolden our teams to do that even more.
At customer level, I believe that word of mouth is the strongest promotion you can get from other customers. We want to see that feedback coming through from them. We want ARI to be recognised as a destination for retail, for great value, for our product ranges. If we achieve that, it will be a great success. ✈
