By Will Novosedlik
Toto Wolff, the billionaire investor, former F1 driver and CEO of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team, seems to be the ideal brand ambassador for Bombardier, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of business aircraft.
Most of the world commutes to work on public transit, in a car, or, if you are a global executive, on a business class flight. Not Wolff.
“He owns a Bombardier Global 6500. For him, it’s a business tool,” Ève Laurier, Bombardier’s VP communications, marketing and affaires publiques tells strategy. “As CEO of Mercedes AMGF1, he has to be at all the F1 races in the world. That’s probably 10 or 11 months out of the year. But with a wife and young child, he also needs to be able to get home between events to see his family.”
Bombardier regards itself as a true luxury brand, and rightly so. Think of it as NASA meets the Four Seasons, combining precision engineering with customer intimacy. Its Global 6500 seats 17, has a range of 12,223 km – roughly the distance between Toronto and Mumbai – and a top speed of 956km/h, or Mach 0.9, just under the speed of sound. With a price tag of $75 million, the only conveyance that even approaches that would be one of those big seagoing yachts favoured by Russian oligarchs.
Now, the company wants the world to turn its attention to its aeronautical engineering prowess and luxury status, so it’s rebranding itself. The most visible manifestation of Bombardier’s new brand is its shiny new visual identity, which launched on April 23.
Bombardier has introduced a clean, modern look that’s meant to be a nod to the precision engineering that goes into designing and building one of these aircraft, but it could just as easily be interpreted as a means of cloaking what complicated machines they really are. To avoid looking cold and mechanical, the symbol employs nuanced calligraphic strokes that come together with the symmetry of a bird’s wings. To a trained typographic eye, the identity achieves its goal of dissolving the dialectical divide between its cold, hard machines and the warm-blooded men and women who make and fly them.
Beyond the subtle graphic and typographic cues, there is a business reason for the new identity. It’s called perception management. For the last dozen years or so, the name Bombardier has been associated with bad news, due to constant quality control deficiencies, missed delivery dates and massive debt loads. Even after the Quebec government gave it $1 billion in 2015, it continued to struggle under the weight of its debt load of US$10 billion. To get out from under that, it sold off its passenger jet and railway businesses by 2021, and turned its focus on the manufacturing and servicing of business jets. That was the beginning of its road to financial recovery, and its most recent results have proven the wisdom of those divestitures.
But brand perception always lags reality. “Fifty percent of Canadians still think Bombardier owns Skidoos, (a business Bombardier sold off in 2003) and almost as many think we still do trains,” says Laurier. “The timing of this relaunch strategically reflects the decision we made four years ago to divest everything that isn’t core to business aviation. It’s time to change those lagging perceptions once and for all.”
Yesterday’s public announcement begins a two to three-year “sunset to sunrise” roll-out of the new branding across all customer- and employee-facing assets. A mass advertising campaign makes no sense when you only sell 150 of these in a year, so a launch video will be deployed on screens in executive lounges (or Forward Base Operations as they call them) around the world.
