Case study: Europe by easyJet

In September, the airline launched ’Europe by easyJet’, which featured still travel photography from destinations around Europe. Its message – that the airline connected people to experiences, places and other people – aimed to inspire customers and staff alike.

Marketing director Peter Duffy explains: “Because we’re a service-oriented business, our people are the frontline of our interaction with customers. We wanted to engage them with the brand before we rolled it out.”

EasyJet launched the campaign internally two to three months before releasing it to the public via a bespoke microsite. The creative focuses on travel photography showing holiday-makers having fun, says Duffy. To get easyJet staff behind the campaign, the microsite encouraged them to upload their own holiday photos, which would then be used internally and externally.

Duffy explains: “It involved getting them to co-create the campaign and contribute to the material.”

Out of easyJet’s 8,000 staff, an impressive 5,000 contributed to the campaign. “Advertising is one of those things that everyone has an opinion about. Staff want the company’s advertising to be good, they want to be proud of it and they want it to work. The opportunity to get involved in the development of that is quite unusual,” says Duffy.

The thinking behind the internal campaign was not only to inspire and engage employees but to strongly align external and internal communication and empower staff as brand ambassadors.

“The way the brand comes to life inside the organisation has to be the same as how it comes to life on the outside, and those boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred through social media.

“We spend a lot of time on how we articulate ourselves on all those internal things – appraisals, how we hire, how we develop and train our people – which are focused on a thoroughly consistent mind and brand positioning.”

The idea has been kept alive since the launch with a weekly photography competition and the public-facing Facebook app Memory Maker, where customers can make their own version of the ad using their own photos.

All the staff imagery has been banked and while it is currently only used internally, Duffy says it will also be one of the ways easyJet sources photography in the future.