Virgin Nostalgic
Richard Branson sure keeps it interesting. In the past year, Virign launched three gamechanging services, and marketed them in ways that were just as innovative as the services they aimed to promote. First, there was the Virgin America launch, where influential bloggers were loaded into the company’s inaugural flights and then raved on their blogs about the experience. Nice one Richard, Adam would definitely approve.
Then, Virgin launched Virgin Money, a peer-to-peer lending service. What did Sir Branson do? He gave out red dollar bills with a picture of him and his mother to commemorate the $1,000 she lent him to start Virgin. $1,000 bucks, wow, I assume she got a pretty decent return on that investment.
His most recent launch was Virgin Galactic, and nostalgia took center stage. What’s intriguing and very successful about this campaign is that for something so futuristic as “space travel for the masses”, Virgin went BACK in time to hit home with likely patrons. Take their DNA of Flight logo, for example, which is a fixture on most marketing materials. It’s a brief history of aviation from strapping wings on your back, to the Spirit of St. Louis, to the lunar lander, to Branson’s own SpaceShipTwo:
Also drumming up emotions from the past is Galactic Girl. This character who’s picture will appear on all of the Virgin Galactic spaceships is modeled after Sir Richard’s mother, Eve, who was a stewardess in the early days of air travel. This depiction is a modernized version of her back in the day:
It all takes on a Space-Mountain-Star-Tours-Tomorrowland type feel and really seems to hit home with the affluent demographic who can afford such a trip — mostly people old enough to have lived through quite a bit of the progression of spaceflight and early dreams of space travel. It’s an interesting strategy of looking to the past to build up excitement and interest in the future. Who knows, maybe next we’ll see George Jetson and Spacely Sprockets doing Virgin Galactic super-bowl spots.
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