Keeping Virgin firmly on track

Feature

Keeping Virgin firmly on track

Sarah Copley, sales and marketing director at Virgin Trains, is focused on getting us off the roads and on the rails. Interview by Alex Brownsell.

Alex Brownsell

February 10, 2010

How long?

3-4 minutes

Compared with the glamour exuded by the Virgin brand, the London Euston headquarters of Virgin Trains is remarkably down-at-heel, to the extent that visitors have to pace Platform 1 in search of the entrance to its offices. Yet the lack of sheen fits well with the unfussy attitude of Virgin Trains sales and marketing director Sarah Copley.

Spend any time with a Virgin marketer, and you usually gain an immediate sense of their intoxication with Sir Richard Branson's brand. Yet this straight-talking 36-year-old, who has 15 years of experience in the rail industry, seems rather less interested in it. Instead, her focus lies entirely on getting people out of their cars and travelling on Virgin Trains routes between London and Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow.

Copley took on her role just over two years ago, when she was tasked with converting significant awareness of the Virgin Trains brand into something more commercially tangible.

Fresh priorities

Some of her predecessors were preoccupied with brand-building. However, since the modernisation of the flagship West Coast Main Line route was completed last year, marketing priorities now lie elsewhere.

'Back then, we didn't have the great product that we have today,' says the West Midlander. 'There was a big role for just developing the brand and getting it out there. More recently, it has been about moving from doing lots of activity toward building a marketing strategy based on the growth of passenger numbers.'

True to an unusual career path at Virgin Trains, which has included a 10-month stint as revenue director, Copley seems at pains to ensure that every penny spent by her marketing department delivers a tangible return, and helps the company to reach its stated aim of growing annual passenger numbers from 25m to 28m by 2012.

Soon after assuming her current role, she kicked off a review of the brand's agency arrangements. Copley believed it was important to terminate some long-standing agency relationships to assist 'the next stage of the evolution of Virgin Trains'. RKCR/Y&R, Craik Jones and Glue were disposed of in favour of Cossette UK agencies MCBD, Elvis and Spike.

The first challenge was to mark the start of the brand's Virgin High Frequency (VHF) service - three trains an hour between London and primary destinations at peak times - but again, Copley resolved to avoid traditional Virgin trappings. 'We felt our communications were very one-way, very shouty with lots of messages, so we wanted to move to a more two-way, engaging style,' she says.

A campaign was developed around the strapline 'Where do you want to be?', breaking the rail industry's tendency to focus on products and services in its marketing, and instead, attempting to develop a more emotional relationship with its customers.

The two humorous TV ads depicted individual journeys. A business-focused execution looked at a man preparing a company presentation, while the other spot featured a woman in search of romance.

'The core thought is that we take millions of journeys, but every one of those journeys has a story behind them. So we took the stories and played them out in a way that people can relate to, with warmth, humour and wit, but also very grounded in our product,' says Copley.

One Virgin cliche the marketer found herself unable to avoid was a cameo from Branson, as a tattooed refuse collector, his first in a Virgin TV ad for about a decade. However, rather than celebrating the appearance for its kitsch appeal, Copley said it marked an important moment when the Virgin founder placed his full weight behind the rail brand.

'From the early stages of planning the TV ads, (Branson) wanted to get involved and show his support for Virgin Trains. He had seen what a difficult journey we had had at times. That went down really well, especially from an internal perspective - it was a massive boost,' she says.

It was also, claims Copley, a sign that Virgin Trains had ceased to be a drain on the parent brand and had begun making a positive contribution. 'Virgin is a great brand to be associated with, but in the early days of Virgin Trains, we were more of a debtor to the brand. Now there has been a massive swing and we see our role as contributing to it,' she says.

This is perhaps a greater source of pride than Copley lets on. She may be keen to quote ROI statistics and celebrate the success of its CRM activities, but breaks into a mischievous grin when she discusses Virgin Trains' line in irreverent tactical ads.

Over the past 12 months, the brand has mocked everyone from Irish footballer Robbie Keane and Australian cricket captain Ricky Ponting to celebrity favourites Katie Price and Peter Andre. In the case of the latter, the ad that followed news of the couple's separation carried the tagline: 'We'd get Peter back with Katie faster than a magazine deal.'

As well as delivering more commercially effective advertising, Copley is determined to ensure the brand remains relevant. 'I think we had lost a bit of ground, so it was about talking about things in people's lives, being timely, in a cheeky way, and really on the mark in terms of how we link it back to a message about our brand,' she adds.

The ad hoc nature of Virgin Trains' tactical ads may be a sign of things to come. Although the brand will rerun its VHF TV ads later this year, Copley is looking to make more aggressive use of print and outdoor to convince consumers to ditch their cars in favour of rail.

Virgin Trains has already run several ads at motorway traffic hotspots, but Copley says the company needs to be more belligerent in pointing out the futility of some car journeys. 'We've got a really competitive route that can compete with the car, but we need to be bolder and braver in our communications,' adds Copley.

'These are habitual car journeys - people know there are traffic jams, that they can't finish that presentation, that it takes longer, and yet we still only have 2%-3% share in the route we operate. We need to put a mirror in front of people's faces.'

As revealed in Marketing last month, Virgin Trains will also seek brand partnerships as a way to make journeys more exciting. It has already signed up Nintendo and Lastminute.com as early triallists, with the former providing brand ambassadors armed with DS games for consumers to try.

All this luxury is a far cry from the cold, damp corner of Euston from which Virgin Trains operates. Nonetheless, it would seem that the simple life suits Copley just fine.