Braniff

The end of the Plain Plane

How do you re launch an airline? According to Mary Wells Lawrence book the client brief was emphatic;

He never stopped telling me that he wanted an idea so big it would fill up his new jets overnight because, as he said a few hundred times, “an empty seat from Dallas to New York is revenue lost forever”.

Ad exec Mary Wells saw the airline as staid and hired an architect Alexander Girard, a fashion designer Emilio Pucci, and a shoe designer Beth Levine.

Here creativity started with an audience insight; where do you find frequent fliers? At the airport. So Girard came up with the idea of painting all the planes primary colours

“The problem, as I saw it, was to destroy the monotony,” Girard is quoted as saying . “Do something to make the performance lively and interesting. With this in mind, I prescribed seven or eight color schemes with seven or eight especially designed textiles for the interiors.” 

And the TV ads celebrated this

“We hired Alexander Girard to do our planes—we have blue planes, orange planes, yellow planes. You can fly with us seven times and never fly the same color twice . . . Inside [we have] seven different color schemes, and since we fly to Mexico and South America, and from Peru, Brazil, and Argentina . . . Cha-cha-cha. Braniff International announces the end of the plain plane. We won’t get you where you’re going any faster, but it’ll seem that way.”

Inside was just as radical; Girard selected fabrics and the crew dressed by Pucci - who developed the Air Strip - recognising most flights went from somewhere cold to somewhere hot, the crew stripped during the flight;

The “Air Strip” was the brainchild of Mary Wells, and Pucci designed a multilayered outfit of a coat and space helmet (or “Rain Dome”), a jacket and wraparound skirt, a dress, and a jumper/culotte two-piece, which would all be worn together, a layer being removed at each key in-flight interval

There is lot more detail in Mary Wells Lawrence excellent biography, but when she moved on to work with other airlines Braniff hired another genius - legendary adman George Lois. He came up with a campaign celebrating the people who chose to fly Braniff. When you got it - flaunt it became an iconic campaign featuring Andy Warhol, Sonny Liston, Salvador Dali, the Playboy Bunny and more. Again Lois’ Damn Good Advice book has more background, including this

Yet another spot was produced with a Braniff stewardess welcoming an eclectic procession of business travelers: Joe Namath, Emilio Pucci, the Italian fashion designer to the Jet Set, thespians Gina Lollobrigida, Tab Hunter and Sandra Locke, jockey Diane Crump and the Rock group Vanilla Fudge

Did it work? Braniff reported an 80 percent increase in business during the life of the campaign in spite of an economic downturn the following year.

YourSuperpower is a new project celebrating creative that drove real business success. Great ideas that transform business can come from anywhere and take many forms. Sometimes an ad agency is instrumental but often not - suggesting to me that Creativity is too important to be left to people with the C Word in their job title.

In coming weeks we will look at Louboutin Soles, San Pelligrino. AirPod headphones, Ploughman’s Lunch, the Tour de France, Aesop store locations, Hendricks and Cucumber, Snapple and Kiwi Fruits. And we are just getting started.