Landor’s New York Managing Director, Allen Adamson, has advice for United and Continental on their new brand: it will be their employees who make it succeed—or fail.
Archive for August, 2010
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Friday, August 6th, 2010URL
Thursday, August 5th, 2010The days of the Pan Am Worldport at JFK seem to be numbered, but if you’ve flown Delta out of JFK you might not be too sad to see it go. Even Delta’s president described it as “the worst facility that we operate.” Today, Delta and JFK announced a $1.2-billion expansion of Terminal 4, which will by 2013 handle all of Delta’s international flights. The announcement comes a day after Delta said it would upgrade dining options at LaGuardia. Delta isn’t the first airline to realize that the terminal experience is an important part of the brand experience.
If you had wings
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010When I was a kid, we’d always have to get to the airport early on family vacations so I could visit all the various airline check-in counters and get some loot. In those days, every counter at least offered timetables and luggage tags, and most offered much more. The best ones had junior wings.
There are apparently more than 900 different kinds of junior wings out there. As a kid, visiting the check-in counters, I managed to collect ten of them: Air Canada, America West, American, Continental, Delta, Lufthansa, Northwest, SAS, Time Air, and United. Not bad for a 10-year-old.
Years passed. I found a set of Pan Am wings at a gift shop once, but otherwise, that was the end of my collection of wings. Until I realized something that 10-year-old Cameron would never have imagined:
You can find wings on eBay. (more…)
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Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010I doubt there are very many airlines in the developed world that still publish paper timetables—if I’m wrong, let me know—but before the Internet, they were ubiquitous. Airline Timetable Images has an incredible collection of hundreds of timetable covers. It’s amazing how you can trace an airline’s history through its timetables; you can watch as a failing airline goes from glossy, four-colour printing to one-colour on newsprint.
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Monday, August 2nd, 2010After a mid-air collision that killed 49 people, Howard Hughes ordered every plane in the Hughes Airwest fleet painted a bright yellow. The advertising agency, Foote, Cone & Belding, took the eccentric millionaire’s directive in stride and branded the airline “Top Banana in the West.” This wasn’t the first time an airline’s branding elements were inspired by safety; Northwest Airlines’ red tail was originally chosen for visibility.
Zombies!
Sunday, August 1st, 2010
An investor group announced in March that it has acquired the trademarks for Eastern Airlines and plans to launch a new carrier with that name.
But before they do, they may want to consider what happened to Pan Am. Because after 64 years, the storied Pan Am brand ended up not in the skies but on the rails.
The brand was sold off after the original Pan Am’s bankruptcy in 1991. In 1996, the blue Pan Am globe was flying once again on a single A300 christened the Clipper Fair Wind. But the second Pan Am didn’t last long; after a star-crossed merger with Carnival Air Lines, another Pan Am followed the first into bankruptcy. (more…)