Summer 2018: The Virgin Trains brand was experiencing a low. It had lost the East Coast franchise and Virgin founder, Richard Branson, was in the news for all the wrong reasons, making brand sentiment its lowest for years. This was having a negative impact on the business with revenues falling well behind target.

To stem this decline, the client briefed us on a traditional advertising campaign. But we knew this was never going to be enough.

We challenged them to see that pushing ad messages could turn audiences off. Passengers felt let down by the original challenger brand, advertising wasn’t going to cut it.

We needed to do something bolder. We needed a big idea that would positively impact travellers’ experience and build brand love again. After much debate, we convinced the business that the solution was influencing the product experience itself, reminding consumers what the Virgin brand stands for.

To rebuild brand love, we had to understand why passengers weren’t travelling with us. We quickly saw the barrier and the solution.

The UK was experiencing a heatwave and Google searches for spontaneous weekend getaways were rising. However, weekend getaways start on Fridays, but passengers are penalised with peak prices when they most want to travel: mornings and after work. Peak tickets can cost 100% more than off peak, a clear passenger barrier and goes against challenger brand values.

The proposed solution was to break the long-established pricing structure, removing peak fares on Fridays to allow more spontaneous travel. A business solution, not an advertising solution.

It had never been done and was a huge risk to revenue. Confident that demand would over-compensate for the hit in revenue, we convinced the business to back this idea and for the first time in Virgin Trains history, we changed the pricing structure.

But advertising did play a role. We had to bring this new pricing model to the masses, so developed a campaign around a spontaneous lifestyle, delivered spontaneously.

We split our activity into two. The first was driving awareness of this industry-first change to our pricing and e-commerce offering by communicating the benefit with high-reach, long-range media. This was upweighted in key locations along the Virgin Trains West Coast route. Within these communications we dialled up ease of purchase through our Alexa skill and e-commerce app.

The second strand targeted spontaneous travellers in the moment, using data signals and search retargeting to react to changes in weather, behaviour and intent and serve dynamic prices, encouraging travel within the next 48hrs.

To bring this to life, we developed a campaign around a spontaneous lifestyle.

We set about delivering inspiration for spontaneous outings.

We worked with Grapeshot, a contextual intelligence platform, to create a bespoke data set which combined travel articles around ‘what’s on this weekend’ in various cities, pinpointing the day of week when our audience were feeling most spontaneous. Activity ran only on these days.

We also developed a partnership with music streaming service Spotify, appearing against playlists that focused on summer weekends. This helped to create a sense of fun and celebration of the season’s possibilities.

And we fuelled spontaneity yet further by developing “Your Squad’s Super Spontaneous Trip Generator” whereby, working with TimeOut, we generated random trips for friends.

Finally, through Virgin Train’s Alexa skill, which allows direct bookings through voice, we encouraged yet more fun, at the same time removing friction from the purchase journey.

Despite fears, our radical approach generated an average of £33k ADDITIONAL revenue every Friday of the summer.

Virgin Trains was also able to spread passenger loads more evenly, and remove overcrowding from peak trains, with critical routes seeing capacity drop from 113% to 51%. This massively improved customer experience and Net Advocacy scores increased by 32% post campaign, with a whopping 94% of customers saying they were likely to travel with Virgin Trains again.

The previously nervous, but now overjoyed, client commented that our strategy looked ‘beyond traditional advertising to deliver real bankable business results’.

Our bold move restored brand love and even created a whole new business model – and a successful one at that. Virgin Trains have now permanently removed peak pricing on Fridays, leading the industry once more by championing the Virgin spirit of spontaneity, innovation and adventure.