Flights Of Imagination

The new livery, to be introduced over the next three years, will include 50 different designs aimed at portraying the airline as British but modern; rooted in its UK heritage but at home wherever it travels.

But the publicity surrounding the launch, which has forced BA to deny suggestions it is dropping its Britishness, raises questions about what large organisations gain when they seek new corporate identities.

The question is particularly pointed when, as in the case of British Airways or British Telecommunications in the early nineties, the task of establishing a new identity has not been forced on the company as a result of a merger or takeover but has been chosen deliberately, even in the knowledge that it will generate controversy at least initially.

 

BT decided it must change its image to mark its shift from UK monopoly to private sector company looking for business overseas. The 60 million ($98million) image redesign included not just the introduction of a piper as its logo criticised then for being lightweight and whimsical but adoption of BT as its trading name.

For both BA and BT, the new identity was an outward sign of significant change within the organisation, heightening the contrast between the amount spent on a new image with the number of jobs to be lost.

At BA the new identity is part of the organisations second revolution, launched last year by Robert Ayling, BAs chief executive, to prepare the airline for the next millennium. The first revolution, culminating in BAs privatisation in 1987, changed the airline from being a company criticised for a bad service to one of the worlds most profitable and admired carriers.

Mr Ayling says the second transformation is necessary because BA has to compete in more liberalised markets, where low-cost carriers can offer cheaper fares. It also has to compete against new airline groupings, such as the Star Alliance, a six-airline partnership led by United Airlines of the US and Lufthansa of Germany, which unveiled a new logo last month.

As part of its programme for the new millennium, BA is cutting costs by putting out to contract services such as catering which can be done more cheaply by outside suppliers. But it is also offering monolingual cabin staff voluntary redundancy and replacing them with flight attendants who speak foreign languages and can deal with customers from a variety of backgrounds.

The new livery, the cost-cutting and the change in staff skills are all designed to show employees and customers that the airline is changing.

This identity should put a clear blue sky between BA and its competitors, says John Sorrell, the chairman of Newell and Sorrell, the London consultancy which designed the new livery.

On BAs instigation, Newell and Sorrell travelled the world talking to potters, weavers, quilt-makers and calligraphers in an attempt to come up with the right designs. The livery includes a paper-cut of a cockerel by Koguty Lowickie, a Polish artist who uses sheep shears to create her designs.

Another aircraft tail will be decorated by Whale Rider, a painted wood carving by Joe David of the Clayoquot people of north-west Canada, who spends days selecting his wood and feels he is giving away part of his soul and spirit whenever he lets a work go.

Another will carry the design Delftblue Daybreak, inspired by traditional Delft ceramics and created by Hugo Kaagman, who began his career spraying graffiti in the centre of Amsterdam.

Brian Boylan, chairman of Wolff Olins, a London-based design consultancy, says that services in sectors such as telecommunications are becoming more uniform, compelling providers to seek ways of showing how they stand out from competitors.

As innovations, for example billing per second, are copied more quickly, it becomes harder to achieve lasting differences in the product itself. You cannot sustain those differences, so you have to look at softer issues, he says.

These new competitive pressures have helped to change the corporate identity industry from its early days at the beginning of the sixties. It emerged then in the US with the first wave of industrial conglomerates and at first focused on creating names and logos.

John Rushworth, a director of Pentagram, the UK-based design consultancy, believes the corporate identity has evolved further since then. In the sixties and seventies, designing a corporate identity was seen as a labelling exercise, he says. But today a good identity is about understanding the essence of the brand or the company. Its not just a badge, its a management mechanism.

But there are limits to what a new corporate identity can achieve, no matter how varied its tone. While it signals the companys aspirations and intentions to both employees and those outside the organisation, customers experience of the products and services it provides, and their own contacts with staff, will weigh more heavily in determining their attitude towards the business.

Charles Trevail, managing director of identity consultant Sampson Tyrrell, says there are three ways to judge whether a change in corporate identity has been effective: Is there a stronger bond of loyalty between the company and its customers; does the share price go up; and do staff understand and believe in the new values of the company?

BA says its staff, who were shown the new livery before its public launch, generally liked the designs. Whether they approve of BAs new corporate direction is another question.

Cargo and baggage staff have agreed to wage freezes as part of an agreement that will keep them inside BA. However, ground staff are being allotted on whether to take industrial action over the sale of British Airways Heathrow catering operation.

Some in BA are pessimistic about the outcome of the ballot, saying they think staff will support their unions over the contracting-out programme. If they are to convince their workforce that BA needs to change, it will clearly take more than new tail designs from around the world.

Alison Smith and Michael Skapinker