Brands
 

I think it is more to do with tax and employment rights.
Ryanair close a base and reopen it as buzz new contracts needed for staff in a few years that closes and goes to Malta air

cheaper labour and costs will be the bottom line for Ryanair

But you can do that without changing the brand - just a different AOC e.g. would the average SLF spot the difference between easyJet and easyJet Europe?

You don't even need to have a different website to allow the extra brands. It's not that difficult to create a new skin for the existing FR website, so that customers see a different logo in the required places, while the underlying code framework stays exactly the same

In Buzz livery the 8200 viewed in the metal leaves little question of an identity.

davidjohnson6

But why go to the bother? You already have a brand which is well known, why dilute it with two new one's? Are people more like to fly with Buzz than Ryanair, pay more? Are Buzz going to offer a differnt level of service, so you need to differentiate?

That's exactly it. easyJet have three AOCs EZY/EZS/EUJ but one pan European unified branding. It's not as if Ryanair couldn't have used "Ryanair Buzz" or similar, the three Ryanair brandings are wholly disconnected. The race to keep
costs low is a known and long standing one, Norwegian also went down this path, but again, the Norwegian, Irish, Swedish and British AOCs had one unified branding.

Surely decoupling Buzz and Malta Air will have a sales and marketing cost.

The projected livery for Malta Air says very much more about Malta than even the good ole harp livery perhaps to venture.If that is the case then more of a marketing success compared with a wee bit of software.

I'm no brand expert or marketing strategist, but a parallel may be seen in the automotive industry with the VW choice of branding - the eastern European offshoot (lower labour costs) as Skoda -essentially the same cars as mainstream VWs, the Spanish subdivision branded as SEAT, again the same cars, but lower labour costs and a sportier look, and the upmarket German brand, AUDI.

There must be some logic behind it because they're all VWs under the skin.

The Malta Air fleet is currently well over 100 a/c - so doubt whether many of them will be seen in Malta on any given day. Not sure what your point is?

speed13ird

The different VW brands are differentiated by price, reputation, specification, equipment level etc - I've not seen anything about differences in the RYR brands

southside bobby

What does this mean?

I suspect only a tiny fraction of Malta Air will see their own livery and similar with Buzz. They're Ryanair fronts, nothing more. Any attempt to google "book malta air" simply takes you to Air Malta pages. It is literally driving traffic to airmalta.com !

There's no attempt at SEO.

Now as a marketing analyst, in any business I have ever been involved in, that would be ringing alarm bells.

Buzz has signed big deals with IT operators in Poland to supply the aircraft for the inclusive holidays. Maybe a reason for the branding?

Exactly...Posters are looking at the proposals & original planning purely from a UK market perspective.

Not really - roughly 50 a/c on the polish AOC. Must be more to it than that.

Still yet to see an explanation for the different AOC's being given diferent brands.

southside bobby

Didn't mention the UK directly on the branding point.
Ryanair is a pan European brand based in Dublin. Do they need 53 aircraft in Poland for IT flights for third parties? Or 120 aircraft based in Malta serving Luqa? No.
Will they be flying Germany-Italy with Malta Air branding? If so, *WHY*?

No one's attacking Ryanair. We're just questioning the branding strategy as it makes little sense on several levels IMHO.

Ryanair have through the years irritated more than a few customers, and politicians, so they could probably do with attacking some markets with new brands. Sample wasn't Lauda bought as n lternativ branding for the german speaking market. Could also see that they would do better with alternative name and livery if they ever went more heavily into the Nordic market. They might enjoy a grudging respect as an airline but they are not near what easyJet stand for as a brand to sell to those of potential passengers that do not only look at who have the lowest price down to the cent. That segment becomes larger and larger as the market share of Ryanair Group as a whole grows.

As a business gets larger, it may see a need for market segmentation to increase market penetration. Previously, FR's segment was "cheap". But now it's "Mediterranean" (Malta Air), "Germanic " (Laudamotion), and "East Europeans on holiday" (Buzz), thereby widening its appeal.

Great point, well made.
That's interesting but there's a cost to fleet flexibility. Is the strategy not to drive all traffic via ryanair.com or are they going to actually skin a proper website for each brand? If your hypothesis is right, I wouldn't expect them to serve each market via a Ryanair sales portal. It would surely need a bespoke website and app for each company in the group. Perhaps MOL's "costs to a bare minimum" strategy has gone and this is a sea change? This isn't something you half do on the cheap IMHO.

What about possible listings on the stock exchanges raising further capital, while retaining stakes in said off shoots.

Not that they need more capital, but it's an idea..... possibly readying themselves for an assault on the transatlantic market?

Can't imagine in any sense that O'Leary would even glance at a transatlantic route. Enough fools on those routes. No while never say never may prove sometimes true, the time Ryan Air looks in that direction is well into the future, not the foreseeable one either for me.

Nah, this guy can carve up Europe in the next decade without gulping down a mouthful of pond.

LGS6753;

You are forgetting the obvious from a Ryanair internal POV. To generate the next senior management you need people to get experience. 4 subsidaries which are sizeable airlines in their own right provide 4 times the number of people who can be provided with experience in running the whole of Ryanair. Failing to do this leaves Ryanair seeking some external candidates when MOL has had enough. Some of your management will not cut the mustard but quite a few will and whether the gain the top job or other you will have trained a whole new group of senior management.