brief to develop a worldwide campaign to improve BA’s image. A Central
Policy Unit was set up to plan and coordinate the account worldwide and
overseas offices of Saatchi & Saatchi had little autonomy from London. The
campaign attempted to position BA as the world’s leading and most suc-
cessful airline. ‘It had to be simple and single minded, dramatic and break
new ground, instantly understood throughout the world, visual rather
than verbal, long lasting, likeable, and confident.’
The world’s favourite airline
Saatchi created a series of 11 television commercials with the theme the
‘World’s Favourite Airline’. The lead commercial, ‘Manhattan Landing’,
was broadcast worldwide and lasted for 90 seconds with only 35 words. It
depicted the island of Manhattan rotating slowly across the Atlantic to
London with the simple statement, ‘Every year we fly more people across
the Atlantic than the entire population of Manhattan.’
Saatchi’s brief was to communicate the message:
British Airways every year carries twenty five million people, of all nationali-
ties, across the world’s most extensive international route network and
makes every one of them feel good. In other words, despite the airline’s great
size (traditionally associated with ‘cold’ or impersonal qualities in advertising
lore), British Airways’ quality of service is such that it communicates a feeling
of warmth and friendliness, and it makes the business of flying twenty five
million people not just professionally efficient, but also a lot of fun. In short,
it brings a smile to everyone’s face.^2The new campaign was extensively communicated to BA’s country man-
agers. But for some of them there was a concern that the World’s Favourite
Airline slogan lacked credibility. Also, the tactical budget for which
country managers were responsible was to be reduced by nearly 50 per
cent. This caused country managers to protest and they succeeded in rein-
stating some of the tactical budget and in doing so raised BA’s total adver-
tising spend to £31 million for the year.
Delivering the world’s favourite airline ...
Promoting BA as the world’s favourite airline is one thing, delivering was
another. King had cut costs, but in an attempt to improve customer service
he appointed Sir Colin Marshall as Chief Executive in February 1983.
Marshall had strong marketing skills with a background in consumer
markets with car rental companies Avis and Hertz, as well as a brief period
as CEO of retailer Sears Holdings.
Marshall quickly identified with BA’s corporate goal, ‘To be the best and
Creating and implementing relationship marketing strategies 457