For the longest time, the Edmonton Regional Airport Authority, Edmonton Airports, applied its ‘brand’ to all properties including Edmonton International Airport (EIA), Edmonton City Centre Airport, Villeneuve Airport, and Cooking Lake Airport. The centerpiece, EIA, has never had its own brand – yet it is the gateway to the Edmonton region for upward of six million people a year, and the first point of impression for people coming into northern Alberta. EIA is Canada’s fastest growing major airport and needed a brand that reflected its importance as a hub to Alberta’s Capital Region and the world.
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EXTERNAL CHALLENGES Lack of brand, brand confusion, and a highly competitive market regionally, nationally and globally for new routes and passengers influenced the approach to strategy for this client. This, coupled with an aggressive timeline, meant that development had to be tightly managed alongside strong rationalization necessary to meet the requirements of a large and diverse constituency of stakeholders. INTERNAL CHALLENGES In the beginning, many stakeholders had their own ideas of what brand meant and of what the process would yield. To overcome such challenges, Donovan Creative brought opinion together to establish a shared vision that would move the project past the posts of development. This was accomplished by forming a strong representative and diverse steering committee, and equipping them with the vision and tools to see the brand pathway. Donovan Creative facilitated the entire process, and established rapport between participants and the process, and departments with departments. Because branding doesn’t end when the brand is ‘delivered’, seminars were held with EIA senior managers and managers about ‘living our integrated brand’. This Donovan Creative seminar was developed for organizations so they can take control of their brand culture, language, and all of the finer points of living a brand that must be seriously adopted for brands to develop and grow authentically. May 8th was designated as the brand launch date and our year zero. At that time we methodically brought all campaigns and initiatives to heel under the new brand image and regime. THE CREATIVE STRATEGY Donovan Creative developed a strategy to build a brand around the strategic, driving property – the one that, by 2012, nine million passengers per year would be experiencing. We recommended keeping Edmonton Airports as the so-called ‘shadow endorser’ but pulled that back and made EIA the most public facing brand. We re-engineered the entire brand family of properties from Edmonton Airports, through EIA, City Centre, Villeneuve, and Cooking Lake airports. The brand promise Donovan Creative established for EIA ("We'll move you") was authentic (the proof was in the successful uptake it received internally), with functional, emotional, and self-expressive benefits that will be leveraged over time. The brand promise speaks to what the organization functionally does day by day; but it also speaks to an organizational commitment to making a difference to every passenger, partner, and peer one experience at a time. |
