WineCountryUA

This time 100.

We FTers are an insulated community and UA would not use a national advertising campaign to attract nowadays -- instead direct corporate campaigns, status matches, .... Most business travelers are locked up by corporate contacts with the majors. Yes, there is some independent, high value flyers but a national campaign is a very inefficient outreach approach for that group.

This campaign is obviously aimed a leisure flyers that are looking to feel good about their purchase choices -- this is a key characteristic of educated millennials. UA is investing in the next generation of life long and affluent customers. While price will still be a major factor, thinking well of your purchase choice is high up there for this demographic.

Additionally, making employees feel respected does have a positive impact on customer service and relationships with management. UA and most of the majors have difficult employee relationship and with post-COVID contact negotiations coming up, that could be a secondary benefit.

Neither are these will relate to most on FT but they are type of messages advertising firms are proposing to corporate entities.

CLT

Did anyone's united.com have any design changes since the new marketing campaign? Black is basically featured everywhere blue was before. The homepage is still normal if I use private browsing, so I suppose this is some type of beta.

angetenar

Yep, black on top for me as well. Honestly not the look; the dark blue was much better.

DELee

Apparently someone at UA thinks black is the new blue.

David

Starbase 1K

Wow, what *ARE* these new UI changes? Like, Windows 98 called and they'd really like their high-contrast theme back. I know accessibility is a trend with sites. And that's fine. However, one has to do it well and not sloppy. I've noticed some buttons not working at times. There are now many other design inconsistencies. That square globe in front of the very basic "UNITED" font is ghastly implemented. If I were a UA designer, I don't think I'd want to have my name on this. In fact, this is the type of work that I've seen come out when devs do the design without consulting actual ux/ui.

I've already sent in some feedback on non-working buttons and such. Has anyone else experienced issues with the "new" site?

Also, I know this sounds kind of dumb, but this doesn't invite me to want to book a flight. Thankfully, we still have the UA mobile app. (Lord, please don't let them mess it up.)


(Apologies in advance if this topic has been already posted. However, I couldn't find it)

DELee

Suspicion over in the New United Ad Campaign: “Good Leads The Way” thread is that this change of colors is related to that ad campaign where good is black.

David

Starbase 1K

Ah you’re right, the thread exists. Thanks!

PTahCha

The new campaign is emphasizing the deathstar(tm) logo in blue instead of the inverted white version, so blue on blue would be, well, less than ideal.

The homepage has a transparent background banner, so it's not so bad.

char777

This seems to coincide with the "Good leads the way" campaign, but I thought this might be worth its own thread.

Has anyone else noticed that there appear to be some new brand guidelines? The globe seems to now always appear in a 2-color, white-on-blue application. In the past few years, it's usually been only seen in monochrome (white cutout over any kind of backdrop.) The blue also seems much brighter. The globe also looks a lot bigger and isn't appearing to the right of the wordmark anymore. On the website and app, it's to the left, and on the new ad campaigns, it's placed in all kinds of random places. Also, the addition of things in a pure black rather than navy seem unusual.

I'm sure 90% of the people on here probably don't care, and I'm sure those people will verbalize that, but I did find these changes interesting. I'm not sure if it's for the better as it seems like UA is all of the sudden introducing new elements after doing fairly well at coming up with a consistent look in the last 4-5 years. Just when you think UA will go for something visually consistent, they'll come up with something new and completely different that doesn't really match anything that came before it.

dham

FWIW, recently saw a “good leads the way” billboard in Denver that said something along the lines of “change fees are gone for good. Forever” or something like that. So they are emphasizing some of the specific quality of service aspects in their marketing.

unitedbusiness

i saw that same billboard at a few locations throughout the Mile High City too!
Modern, fresh and clean design…
that is one brilliant looking ad and a sharp looking billboard!

PTahCha

Isn't that the definition of brand refresh? The logo is the same, albeit now in United Blue. The wordmark is the same. The website layout is the same. The only difference is now they are willing to de-couple the deathstar logo from the wordmark.

char777

Oh it's certainly a refresh. I just question whether it's in the right direction. I felt like the refresh they've been doing since ~2017/2018 when they dropped gold for purple and started using a redrawn globe has looked pretty sharp and has stood out from everything before it, which was always just some mish-mash vestiges of the CO brand. I don't know how much I like the decoupling of the globe and wordmark or the use of black. Then there's also the typeface inconsistency: the new ads appear to use Neue Plak, whereas the official brand typeface for most items is FF Clan, but they're too cheap to license FF Clan for the web so they use the free Google Open Sans in a lot of places as a stand-in.

Aside from that though, I think the campaign messaging is on point. UA is unquestionably a better airline than it was years ago (perhaps ever? at least in my lifetime) and I think this campaign articulates that well.

artvandalay

FT--as a useful, often credible UA travel forum--still manages to entertain.

char777

I didn't say it was perfect or that it's the best in the world, but UA is a better airline than it was during the darkest of the Smisek days.