Ryanair's Communications Strategy: From Hostile to Customer-Friendly

Introduction

Ryanair, the Dublin-based discount airline, has traditionally earned a poor reputation for customer service — to the point where it finished dead last in a survey of 100 companies as having the worst customer service in Britain (Smith, 2013). The company's response to those survey results was fairly typical of its corporate communications style: "We surveyed over three million passengers on the Ryanair website last night. Only two of them had ever heard of Which? And none of them had ever bought it or read it" (Smith, 2013). The response — flippant, sarcastic, and insulting — surprised nobody, because that is how Ryanair has always communicated with the outside world, including its own customers. Yet there are signs that the company has been revisiting its communications strategy in recent years. This paper examines the historic strategy and what Ryanair has been doing to change it.

The Old Strategy

Ryanair operates as a discount airline and has projected itself — and its customers — as caring about nothing else. Customers only care about low fares, the company argued, and therefore that is all we care about. This stance was part of the company's image, crafted to convey that it offers the lowest fares in a highly competitive discount airline market. Customer service, to Ryanair, was like everything else: a frill to be indulged sparingly. The company developed a persona characterized by dismissiveness and truculence. This attitude came from the top, in part reflecting CEO Michael O'Leary's own personality, and should be understood as an image the company deliberately cultivated (Topham, 2014). Dealing with the media and the public — even customers — costs money, so it was almost preferable to maintain a communications strategy that portrayed the company as having neither the time nor the inclination to worry about such things. Ryanair cultivated this image, antagonizing consumers and competitors alike, and showing disdain for all and sundry (Moth, 2014).

The strategy proved effective in a couple of respects. First, it helped differentiate Ryanair from its competitors. Second, it provided O'Leary with opportunities to step in front of a microphone and repeat the company's low-price mantra. Every scandal, every customer service failure, and every controversy simply generated more free publicity for the brand and gave O'Leary another platform to sell his company (Smith, 2013). This proved essential in creating the perception that Ryanair was the definitive low-cost provider in the industry. Consumers faced with sufficiently low prices are unlikely to shop around extensively, so by positioning itself as the cost leader, Ryanair became the first port of call for budget-conscious travelers. Building this reputation — even on the back of customer service scandals and poor communications — proved effective, and helped Ryanair grow its business rapidly (McGarrity, 2015). It was a gamble that customers really did care only about price, but the gamble paid off.

In line with this approach, while other companies were embracing social media as a means of building a positive brand image and engaging with stakeholders, Ryanair largely eschewed it as a communications tool, or at least treated it as beneath the company's concern. The company came to realize, however, that its bad reputation was beginning to threaten business, and that the old communications strategy would not sustain it through an increasingly competitive marketplace. With that recognition, Ryanair sought to overhaul its approach to communications entirely.

The New Strategy

If the old strategy was belligerent, surly, and contemptuous, the new one aimed to salvage a brand image that had become famously poor. Ryanair's customer service record had made it a subject of ridicule, and as a result the company was struggling to win new customers. With the business at risk, the first step of the new strategy was to envision what kind of company Ryanair wanted to be perceived as. Leadership recognized that they may not need to become masters of customer service, but that they did need to present a friendlier face to the public and to the industry at large. There was a pivotal moment when CEO O'Leary acknowledged that the company's image had become too much a reflection of his own personality, and that this was holding the company back (McGarrity, 2015).

The first element of the new strategy was to put a new face on the company. O'Leary had long been Ryanair's public persona, which is why its public relations and communications so closely reflected his character. Everyone within the company took their cues from O'Leary's communications style. The appointment of new Chief Marketing Officer Kenny Jacobs in 2014 introduced a different voice. O'Leary had to step back publicly and signal that his style was not the way forward, so that Jacobs could step in and restructure the company's communications approach (Topham, 2014).

Jacobs moved to restore some positivity to Ryanair's reputation. While the underlying culture remained the one O'Leary had fostered, Jacobs was given a clear mandate to build a new one. He specifically announced a new company policy: "Stop unnecessarily pissing people off" (Topham, 2014). The company also overhauled and modernized its long-outdated website as a means of improving the customer experience in keeping with the friendlier image it was now trying to project.

Another key element of the new communications strategy was social media. O'Leary had been famously dismissive of it (May, 2010), and Ryanair consequently had almost no social media presence. Indeed, under O'Leary a Ryanair Twitter account would likely have become appointment viewing for fans of schadenfreude — so it was probably fortunate for the company that they had avoided using social media to launch broadsides against customers who arrived with 10.2 kg of hand luggage or turned up five minutes late for a flight to Malta. Under Jacobs, Ryanair began building its social media presence in keeping with the "don't piss people off" policy.

In what has been termed a "customer service rebirth" (Topham, 2014), the company embraced an all-encompassing online strategy. The new approach not only encouraged a better attitude toward the customer but sought to involve customers in building content. Jacobs' vision included customer-to-customer content — providing advice and enabling customers to communicate with one another. The thinking was that this would help create a sense of community and encourage people to engage more with the company's website. The result, in theory, would be that visitors spend more time on the Ryanair site, giving the company more opportunities to understand its target market and sell to that audience (Topham, 2014).

This new approach to communications has been bolstered by television advertising — something Ryanair had not done for decades. Increased marketing expenditure became part of the strategy, particularly as a vehicle for communicating the new brand vision and customer service experience. The content of these advertisements was specifically geared toward restoring the brand image, directly embodying the new communications philosophy the company had adopted.