Jenna Cowie

Said the following about The making of Miles:

“I would like to nominate EMR's marketing team for the 'Making of Miles' please watch this video to help tell our story https://youtu.be/HH_yT0hhxto

Summary

With a need to build saliency and resonate with our audience we embarked on the making of Miles. Our brand character since launch has taken a special place in the hearts and minds of our staff and passengers, whilst smashing ROI and brand health targets too. Thanks to the creativity and bravery of the EMR team we've been able to do something different and very special.

Campaign context

At the beginning of the EMR franchise we had ambitious revenue targets which required something that was going to be bigger than we had done before. Our focus was to tackle modal shift as a result of the pandemic by building consideration for rail and communicating the tangible proof points of rail.

Campaign objective and approach

To successfully deliver against these two challenging objectives, we needed to launch a consistent brand platform that would build brand saliency and resonate with our leisure and commuter audience now but also enable us to build a long-term brand presence and a creative approach that would have longevity. EMR brand awareness was at an all time low given the lack of media during 2020 and into 2021 so we needed to be noticed and remembered.

We decided the strongest creative strategy to deliver our varied communications, from high level brand activity through to specific investment benefits, was to create a fluent device that would represent the key values and service that EMR deliver for its customers everyday but do so in the most engaging, ownable and distinctive way.

But it took time to get the character right. Miles has always had the distinctive M shaped head representing the M in EMR and owned the EMR aubergine, however he started a very rough monster like character. We quickly realised the right way forward was to ensure our brand character represented not only the look and feel of our brand but importantly the values and taking inspiration from our new train interiors. This evolved Miles into something refined, relaxed, friendly and something that’s classy with a twist, which was how the distinctive pocket square was created.

Once we had the final version of Miles we tested through our customer insight research process. Overall, he researched exceptionally well across all parameters delivering a strong emotional response, making respondents laugh and want to get to know him. He was found to be distinctive, unlike any other brand character they had seen which ensured he would be ownable to EMR and support our brand awareness and consideration objectives. He positively shifted perceptions of EMR train travel by creating feelings of comfort and relaxation which reflect positively on the impression of our service.

The launch

Miles launched across AV, Audio, digital channels and Outdoor in Autumn 2021 promoting the enjoyment of travelling by train with Miles bringing to life the best parts of a journey with EMR. Our creative approach had to account for a limited production budget to keep cost low and aligned to cost challenges in the industry but bring to life the best of the EMR proposition and service without highlighting the challenges with variation in our fleet and still being a few years away from our new trains launching.

So, we created our own train all in set design, using our new Standard Class seat provided by Fisa and even the final carpet from the new Aurora was used with set design. The fantastical world we created enabled us to hero our service, our staff and put train front and centre.

Our campaign language tied the channels together ‘Make the journey as exciting as the destination’ ensuring the right message could be used in the right channel e.g. high impact Outdoor supported more of a destination focus with train as the enabler to get there and AV channels promoted the journey itself but all with Miles front and centre.

Taking people

We always saw the potential in Miles but it was important to take EMR staff on the journey to give people the confidence and thinking behind our new brand character.

Pre-launch we hosted ‘Meet Miles’ cinema sessions which took place over 4 days, these sessions introduced Miles, took people through the purpose, creative journey and finally giving our people a sneak peak of the advert and our behind the scene video with a pack of Miles popcorn to enjoy with the show.

It did not stop there; we took Miles on tour to engage our front-line staff in stations and held virtual sessions for people who we had not captured in previous face to face sessions. Miles also featured in our company magazine, which we post out to all EMR staff once a quarter.

We always knew we wanted an EMR staff member to take the lead role in our first advert which also meant we could give staff and customers a sneak peak of the new uniform which launched a month after the advert.

Post campaign evaluation

The launch campaign exceeded all previous creative benchmarks delivering our most recalled campaign to date with 55% of respondents having seen at least one channel. Brand awareness also peaked to its highest since pre-pandemic levels at 84.5% and consideration to travel exceeded our target by 12%. Impression of the brand also showed really positive moves with all metrics improving most notably around ease and impression of the journey (e.g. makes travel easy, enjoyable and offers fast journeys to London).

We also conducted specific analysis which looks at our fluency rating which measures the strength of branding in the ad, driven by speed of brand recognition was rated as exceptional and in the top 14% of adverts.

Our return on investment also saw great success once again delivering our most effective campaign to date with a short term ROI of £2.82 which beat our previously best performing campaign from Autumn 2019.

We also received great earned coverage;

https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/east-midlands-railway-lets-roll-atomic-london/1730890

https://creative.salon/articles/work/atomic-east-midlands-railway-let-s-roll

https://www.lbbonline.com/news/puppet-mascot-miles-takes-a-epic-journey-for-east-midlands-railways-joyful-spot

https://shots.net/news/view/new-east-midlands-railway-brand-campaign-from-atomic

https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/film/east_midlands_railway_lets_roll

Campaign phase 2

Building on the success of the Autumn Leisure campaign launch we launched our 20” Commuter and business travel targeted creative in April 2022. We had captured this footage at the same time as the leisure creative to ensure value for money and synergy with the launch campaign. Once again keeping Miles front and centre but this time focusing on the productivity of the journey by train. Whilst this audience is harder to influence given the post pandemic shift in working patterns, we see our role as building that brand affinity with our existing commuter audience helping them feel positively about us through engaging communications and delivering product specific messages but also resonating with our valuable business traveller where we can influence that decision for a face to face meeting as opposed to virtual.

As with our leisure focused campaign we saw continued success with our commuter campaign maintaining our record high ROIs of £2.61 (which placed this as our second best performing campaign) and perhaps more interestingly increasing the record high for campaign recall up at 66% which indicates the strength of cut-through we are achieving with our new brand platform.

Amplifying our activity

Supporting our effective above the line campaign activity Miles has been brought to life across all of our customer touchpoints to reach both our existing and new customers. At our hub stations we have used Miles within high impact sites to communicate our key product and service offerings from ticket types and journey times through to our hall of fame celebrating all the fantastic attractions and destinations we have within reaching distance of our stations. We have Miles statues in our hub mainline stations which give our customers a chance to get up close and share those all important selfies across social to further amplify our reach and deliver engaging user generated content to help grow our social channels. Not forgetting on-train, for summer we produced Miles activity packs which we gave to passengers travelling over the summer holidays.

What will the team do next...

The warmth we feel from our customers towards Miles and the positive brand health metrics give us real confidence that we have found a creative platform that will see us go from strength to strength. The only limit is our imagination

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