The airline that wants to friend me
A budget airline's pitch makes me wonder how friendly these brands really are
I’m writing this somewhere high above the Iberian peninsula, not benefiting (because I’ve brought my own baguette) from Jet2’s friendly service.
This busy, no-frills airline, launched in 2002, wants to be famous for being super-amicable. Its slogan is ‘Friendly low fares’.
Well, you can’t expect to fly a grammar geek 1,300 miles and not expect him to deconstruct a slogan like that. So let’s see what we have here.
Two adjectives qualify the noun ‘fares’. The first is fine: fares can indeed be low, at least before you start flogging the public carry-ons, in-hold bags, insurance and tempting treats, snacks and drinks!
But can a fare be friendly? This feels like personification too far. A fare is a cold unit of value. I guess you can assign it a human quality: ‘aggressive’, perhaps, ‘fair’? – yes, a fair fare is okay. But I don’t think a fare can be friendly.
Of course, the copywriters behind this three-word masterpiece aren’t talking about the fare. They want to say the airline is friendly: they just don’t have the syntactical room to do it.
Fretting a lot as we pushed back from the gate, I decided to rescue them with some emergency punctuation:
Jet2com
Friendly – low fares.
That just about works in a truncated kind of way. But I don’t expect them to take me up on the offer. The extra dash, working ever so hard to supplant a verb such as ‘offering’, means spending money on paint and printing.
These guys don’t like spending money.
With friends like these
The crew, in their famously friendly red uniforms, were cheerful and pleasant on my flight. But as a rule, Jet2 is no friendlier nor more hostile than any other operator in this crowded airspace. Neither they (nor their fares, nor uniforms) are going to offer you a free drink and ask you how your dog is.
‘Friendly’ in the airline and wider service context has a very specific meaning. It says:
· We are not premium: we are Butlins, not the Four Seasons
· You are going to get the hard sell, because that’s what ‘friendly’ brands do
· We will sell, sell, sell with bold colours and LOUD inflight announcements
· You will only be our friends if you buy more stuff from us.
But all credit to them– at least they have kept their inflight magazine in a papyrophobic world.
JetAway is bursting with the ‘friendly’ qualities enumerated above.
I didn’t find a single word I believed, nor one written with any trace of sincerity or conviction.
This is travel copy at its most tired and tinny. There is not an Old Town that isn’t quaint, a cove that isn’t secluded, a hotel room that isn’t stylish nor a boutique that isn’t high-end. If any of these writers have visited any of the places they are writing about, they do a good job of disguising the fact.
The same goes for the CEO letter, from ‘Steve’. Steve looks like a tough operator to me. In his byline picture, there’s a sort of smile, but the eyes say something else (eg ‘how much are we paying this photographer?)
But Steve’s copy has been through the friendly filter. He starts and ends with a super-friendly exclamation mark – Welcome aboard! And Have a Lovely Holiday! [sic]. He gushes like a teenage influencer about the fab fashion and celeb features. Did you really write this, Steve??? Have you even read it? Bet you didn’t!!!!
Once they were cool
Jet2 is a low-cost airline. It’s going to get shouty.
But does it have to?
For the umpteenth time, my old client British Airways is grappling with whether to launch a budget airline, or just be a bit more budget with what it has.
I always groan when I read this – and I think back to the time they really did launch such an operation, and did it brilliantly.
Bob Ayling’s tenure as CEO was short-lived and not very glorious. But he did some very smart things (the Images of the World ‘tailfins’ campaign wasn’t one of them). Smartest of all was the launch of Go in 1998.
Under a superstar CEO, Barbara Cassani, and a brilliant exile from adland, David Magliano, they, and design consultancy Wolff Olins, created the quintessential millennium brand. It was a lower case world in these days and everything about Go – go – was streamlined and progressive as the Audi TT that was the car du jour back then. From the typography to the Thunderbirds-inspired uniforms, go flew pretty far from the parent BA brand: yet you still felt you were having an ungraded experience, compared to shouty, orange and case-confused easyJet.
Barbara Cassani: eventually, she went
We did our little bit. With designer Russell Kientsch and MD Clare Broadbent at Cedar, we devised The One-Line Guide, which solved the usual economic issue of publishing for cheapskates by giving the writers only one line to describe the Old Towns, coves, boutiques etc. But it had to be a good line; and the writer had to have visited the place.
The one line (actually, one sentence) test is one I’d recommend to any writers or brands looking to distil what something is about, and distil it good.
And I wish BA would dust off the go files. The airline didn’t survive. It ended up being sold, ultimately, to easyJet who took the planes and the routes and canned everything else. The uniforms and magazines ended up on a new thing called eBay.
It’s a mere £14.95 for a piece of publishing history
Ryanair’s cuddly period
Michael, we could have had a beautiful thing going
Later, we were invited to pitch for the Ryanair magazine. They’d hired a bright new marketing chief from Tesco, and they were set on a course of changing their famously combative relationship with the industry, the media and, indeed, their customers.
That reputation was the doing of the famously not cute nor friendly CEO Michael O’Leary: unarmed combat conducted through the gob was very much his style.
The brief asked us to think of new ways of presenting the CEO in a new, friendlier light in the kind of letter Jet2’s Steve put his name to.
I loved that challenge.
We mocked up a picture of O’Leary in a white suit smiling beneficently at his adored customers. A sample headline was:
Aren’t kittens wonderful?
Michael O’Leary explains how his wee fluffy friends make him realise what a sweet and beautiful planet we all share
Did we win the contract? Of course not. We didn’t even send the pitch in. The bastards wanted us to pay them for the privilege of working for them.
How to write one line, or lots of lines, better and in a more satisfying way
Our new consultancy, Forthwrite, does grammar geekery, tone of voice guidance, branding and language. We’ll save you time when your write and angst when you share your writing. The promise: write less, mean more.