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According to its own publicity, this new World Images branding was intendedto reiterate the airline’s desire to be perceived as ‘global and caring’, and tomanifest its long-standing claim to be the ‘world’s favourite airline’. As partof this rebranding
strategy, new tailfin designs featured colorful, ‘ethnic’patterns taken from world-wide arts and crafts, such as Native Americanwood carvings, Japanese calligraphy, German pottery, Scottish tartans andEgyptian wall hangings (see Figure 1b). John Sorrell, one of the two designerswho worked on the World Images concept, stated: ‘Our task was to position
BA as a world brand, the equivalent of Coke or Microsoft, but one which isbased and has its roots in Britain.’What no-one at BA, or the design company commissioned to comeup with the new branding strategy, had predicted was the public criticismand media outcry that would follow this decision by the national ‘flagcarrier’.Along with many high-profile figures, then Prime Minister MargaretThatcher openly expressed her own disapproval of BA’s new identity,characterizing it as unpatriotic and foolish.1 By 1999, BA had startedsuffering major financial losses, explained in part by adverse public opinion
towards its ‘multicultural’ branding strategy. It became apparent that part ofthe post-privatization customer appeal, and therefore financial success, of BAhad in fact been its reputation as a long-standing European airline with theadded image of Britishness as being ‘traditional’ and, therefore, reliable in itsstandards of service.In May 2001, in a major climb-down, BA finally announced itsintention to restore a more recognizably British corporate image to its entirefleet of 338 aircraft. According to Mike Crump, the airline’s senior designmanager at the time, this major corporate failure was rationalized as the
airline’s desire to ‘bring back consistency and unity to the BA brand’. Whenasked about the replacement of the World Image series, however, anotherspokesperson acknowledged a more nationalistic concern: ‘Britishness hasbeen at the core of BA and that view is held worldwide.’V i s u a 306 l C ommu n i c a t i o n 6 ( 3 )
Figures 1a–c British Airways’ tailfin designs: (a) pre-1997; (b) ‘world’ images; and (c) current.
(a)
(b)
(c)
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G L O B A L D I S C O U R S E S : P R O F I T, I D E O L O G Y A N D
S EMI OT I C S T R AT E G Y
People today routinely fuse the near with the far, the traditional withthe new, and the relatively unmediated with the multimediated, tocreate expansive material and discursive worlds that transform lifeexperience and radically reconfigure the meaning of cultural space.(Lull, 2001: 1)
As a case study of corporate branding, the BA story dramatically highlightsthe tremendous tension which sits at the heart of the airline industry’scommercial agenda nowadays. On the one hand, major international carriersmust address an inherently modernist need to represent and establish thenation state; in fact, regardless of the often insupportable cost of running anairline, the maintenance of a flag-carrier continues to have enormoussymbolic value for national governments. On the other hand, however,ai
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