NotOnSunday and We All Need Words rebrand Direct Ferries
NotOnSunday and We All Need Words have injected some personality into Direct Ferries.
The world’s biggest online travel agent for ferry bookings, Direct Ferries already had 2.5 million customers in 25 countries, but wanted to keep growing as an aggregator.
The client initially approached Rob Mitchell of strategy and copywriting agency We All Need Words to help with a new tone of voice for its customer services and bot.
“They asked us what their brand should sound like,” Mitchell says. “In a very kamikaze account management style, I said it could sound like anything, because I don’t think you’ve got much of a brand.”
Duly hooked, the client asked what their brand could look like, with the right help.
Mitchell brought branding agency NotOnSunday on board – they had first worked together on the rebranding of the Scouts’ UK division in 2018.
“We needed a platform and vehicle to enable us to grow,” says Direct Ferries CEO Niall Walsh.
That growth will come from the aggregator share of the market, which is low in this sector – while 45% of tickets for trains are bought through aggregators like TrainLine, it’s just 5% for ferries.
“Conversion rate is everything to us,” Walsh explains. “We’re a traffic acquisition machine. It’s about giving that traffic the best customer experience so that they check out.”
To get them down that funnel, the rebrand needed to instil confidence in its audience.
“Customers can see when there isn’t consistency. If there’s no consistency, there’s no trust, if there’s no trust, people aren’t going to give you their credit card number,” Walsh says.
He admits the company had never previously had a considered brand – instead it had been built through iteration and trial and error.
Visually and verbally, from the website, emails and display ads to the call centre and blog, there was a mix of styles.
“Before you know it, you’ve got a complete mess of images and tone of voice,” Walsh says.
We Are All Words and NotOnSunday set about creating a brand that showed ferry travel in a more aspirational light. They swapped images of ferries and facilities for sea air and views of the horizon, and they ditched cheesy photos of models in favour of travel magazine-style photography.
The wider strategy was to present Direct Ferries as the ferry brand. We All Need Words developed a tag-line – “Wherever you’re sailing, start here.”
This was part of a wider, adaptable brand system using chevrons, which mimic the shape of a ship’s bow. These can be used on their own or paired with ‘A to B’ couplet headlines, mirroring the overall “wherever you’re sailing” line.
The chevrons can be repositioned to take into account different word lengths in the 24 languages that Direct Ferries operates in.
These headline pairings are delivered in a pair of typefaces – the sans serif Mundial, described by NotOnSunday’s Trev Townsend as friendly, and the serif Rocky, which is a little classier.
Together, they’re intended to bring out and draw together the bigger brand system.
NotOnSunday did an audit of the ferry sector, including its iconography of boats and pictograms. “Direct Ferries got lost among the others,” says Townsend.
The previous logo was very literal, says Walsh. “Having three ships to define that you sell a ferry felt slightly dated.”
NotOnSunday crafted the new logo, with a mark created out of the ‘D’ and ‘F’. The angle of the ‘F’ matches that of the chevron.
The new hero colour, orange, was chosen to be both modern and timeless, and to stand out from its blue rivals. That is contrasted with secondary colours that are meant to reference the sea – dark and light blues and greens.
All of the new design work had to fit around the existing UX, because of its robust and proven capacity to drive sales.
“We could change all the details and decorative elements, but we couldn’t change the customer journey, because it’s been tested and tested and it works,” Townsend says.
NotOnSunday redrew the icons, including the car symbol and dog paw print, giving them the same line weight. Similarly, the buttons are now consistent sizes and shapes, with rounded edges to match the logo mark.
And it’s worked, Walsh says. “The data tells us that customers prefer this brand, because nothing else has changed on the website, it’s the same product, price, experience, and the same user journey,” he says.