Aerobrand | Designing aviation ::: Services

Hug An Airline Logotype

How to embrace environmental responsibility – and then have your customers embrace you.

“Hug an airline” is a programme developed by Aerobrand and GreenSkies designed to help an airline create environmentally responsible initiatives – small steps as well as large ones – and then communicate them to the world in a clear and meaningful way.
There are incredibly small things you can do as an environmentally-responsible airline which, if communicated correctly, can have a tremendously positive impact with your customer base.
It is a difficult arena to “get right” (witness some of the recent snafus by various airlines) because unless the brand communication is handled correctly many of these initiatives can backfire. Witness also grandiose claims of “being green” only to find it is more like a Hollywood stage set.
This is why we created “Hug an Airline” – an aviation-specific programme that is both highly creative and extremely honest.

Hug a tree, yes, but hug an airline?

Certainly not what comes to a customer’s mind when they think of behemoth metal tubes billowing CO2 into the sky. However there are myriad initiatives an airline can take to become environmentally responsible and many unique ways companies can weave these into an overall brand communication programme. It is our job to identify these initiatives and then provide a timeline and action plan to accomplish and communicate every one of them.
When a customer has a choice of airlines, being green and communicating your green initiatives becomes a market differentiator from every other operation that simply provides a seat and a bag of peanuts. It has become critical to communicate brand attributes outside of the daily operational issues that might arise so that passengers and the media understand your climate change commitment.

Competitive analysis

The first stage of the programme is devoted to intelligence gathering of your competition and presenting to you a detailed report of the current landscape. You will see where you are ahead, where you are level and where you may be behind. From a competitive standpoint, you will then be in a position to decide where to deploy resources. Choices about how broad or narrow to focus this competitive green assessment will always be yours.

Airline Green Assessment

Stage Two: Through a series of meetings/discussions/knowledge-gathering and our own green-insight, this part of the programme determines areas within your organisation that are prime candidates for pragmatic green initiatives or that show promise for being communicated to specific market segments. It also identifies which areas are “red flags” that could cause media negativity and which areas you may already be looking at that can be integrated into the programme.
We then move into the specific travel and geographic arena of your airline with a detailed analysis of green-specific initiatives that pertain directly to your immediate environment.

Brand Green Pragmatism

Stage Three: The Hug an airline programme shows you exactly how to accomplish these pragmatic initiatives. We develop an ongoing branding communications action plan complete with creative executions of the recommendations made from the assessment.
Actions will be recommended and then performed for marketing, advertising, public relations – all woven together under a green brand umbrella, which together with a corporate credo that can be issued, will position your airline at the forefront of environmental responsibility.
And yes, your customers will hug an airline. Yours.