Project Utopia - British Airways' £60m Mistake 

Pumpkins 😍

That action by Thatcher, though symbolic, was just about the biggest slap in the face any corporation could get. It even trumps the famous phrase "there's no such thing as negative publicity". Yes there is - here.

British Airways's World Tails was kinda cool, but my favorite livery in British Airways was Landor

As someone who lives in Thailand, I always wondered, why the hell is the Thai flag on BRITISH Airways? Weird...

My biggest memory of this was Thatcher covering the tail with the handkerchief.

60 million pound mistake and the CEO in charge is given a 2 million pound send off payout. Crazy, I wish I was paid for my screw ups like that.

I was a teenager in school when these liveries were launched and remember having mixed feelings (but loving Chatham Dockyard). I'm a Captain today at British Airways and boy do I wish this was our biggest issue in 2020. Sadly it's not, but I'm confident we'll survive this chaos (with the rest of the World) and make Britain proud of us again.

The BOAC livery looks soo good still today.

Don’t mess with success. I think £60 million underestimates the true loss, from which it has never recovered. Landor livery is superb. Current one is not its equal.

Not like the company management to screw something up, then get paid a large amount of money to go away....🤔 leaving the someone else to pick up the pieces now is it!??????#babetrayal

Fantastic video. The (former) upper management of BA needed to lookup the definition of "brand dilution". As a national carrier with a rich history of innovations in the aviation industry why they chose to de-emphasize the British part of British Airways is mind-boggling.

Lack of uniform recognition should have stopped the marketing concept before it even left the drawing-board!

Basically took the British out of British Airways. Jokes aside, those tails are very nice

It was a mess graffiti gone mad. You need a corporate image and the Landor design was class.

The one occasion I agreed with Mrs. Thatcher. I remember saying they should repaint the whole fleet in Chatham Dockyard. They did.

The Landor livery was the best.The Chatham Dockyard does'nt even come close.The Landor was certainly a symbol of Britishness,and was classy too. Did'nt realise the Dockyard scheme appeared on Concorde first,which it suited very well. Excellent piece👍😎!

A BEA "Speedjack livery" man, through and through, but I will admit, the Landor livery did look classy

What could be more British than despising Britain while embracing a shallow and trendy interpretation of other cultures? On the other hand, a plane's livery is way, way, way down the list of considerations when choosing a flight, after all of the following. Does it go where I need to go? Is it safe? Do the flights leave and/or arrive at convenient times? How expensive is it? Is it comfortable? Will I be given trouble if I have to modify my flight plans?

Landor was the best livery British Airways ever had and ever will have, it was the peak of both the airline's image and onboard service especially considering BA's current race to the bottom where it offers a Ryanair level of service but for BA overinflated prices... Looking back however, I do sort of miss the world tails but then again, being in Manchester we only have the BA shuttle flights to Heathrow now so we have lost the "colour" one way or the other :/

Landor livery on BA aircraft was classy, they made a HUGE mistake with those other liveries on their aircraft.

Another example of what happens when business executives book out a cruise and the boat leaves no room for customers who are left stranded on the pier. Davos suffers from the same problem of trying to solve a problem they think exists that the public customer doesn’t even care about.

As a frequent trans-Atlantic flyer, I regarded those designs on the tails as vile. It was no longer an airline that could be regarded with pride. I don't agree with everything that Margaret Thatcher did, but she was spot on with her handkerchief!

It was ahead of its time tbh, nowadays we see lots of planes with special liveries, and I think Project Utopia helped kick that off. It's not a bad thing as a concept - make the airline more approachable and feel more locally tailored to the markets that it serve is good business and marketing practice, but to have it being forced down on all the plane fleets to the point of saturation and dilution of branding is a mistake. It feels like a corporation trying too hard. But it also speaks to the conservativeness of the airlines' customers which hated the tail design so fervently - a mess overall

I really loved the Landor image as one of the best corporate images in the world ever made. The new world paint I think was just to ahead of its time. It was really nice but it did dilute the image of Britishness.

I recall a BBC documentary once mentioning this, and taking some time to laugh at BA too, as the public & rival airlines alike were. (in the case of the latter it was all the way to the bank, as BA hemmoraged customers) One can see why too just by looking at these literal eyesores. Makes one wonder how drunk / on drugs - or just detatched from reality - the management were when they decided "Yup... this is the brand look that the customers will like!" XD. The project name "Utopia" should've been redflag in of itself, as the very word is typically used oxymoronically in literature & film, especially in cautionary tales about fraudulent / unrealistic promises.

Why do most marketing people drive BMW's? They can't spell Porsche.

While the abstract art tail designs are really cool, I agree it was a total failure aesthetically and by principle of BA representing Britain. I'm not British and I feel Landor was, and still embodies the British essence. It has also aged really well. There's just something about seeing that regal crown peek above the terminal while at the airport.

Is this the OG "Get woke go broke"? They really screwed the pooch on this one, donkeys bray, take no heed of them. God forbid a corporate airline be seen as a corporate airline.

“Wunala” and “whale rider” will always be my favorite of these. Both very beautiful paintings. Although I loved Qantas version which painted the whole jet in the livery.

The painting of the 747s and Airbus in the older legacy liveries was a great idea but sadly the 747s are now history thanks to the virus.

Those tail livery designs are actually pretty cool. Ndebele Martha, Bavaria, Delftblue Daybreak, and Waves and Cranes are my favorites. I had no idea they did these. Shame they weren't popular

I am one of the few who liked the Utopia livery. Chelsea Rose and Waves Of the City were my favourites

Only the Olympic and Concorde paint schemes looked acceptable. Others were indeed bad decisions

Ah, Thatcher. Cared more for how a model plane was painted rather than the communities she gleefully destroyed.

BOAC livery was better than any. Repainted 747-400 looked great.

After BOAC the Pan Am logo was the second best ever paint job on a jet...Even prop planes looked good in the BOAC colors

I heard that flight controllers hated the scheme too as it impeded identification on the ground.

I love the VC10

I love Landor, its a great livery!

Thank you for creating this. Just found the video and your channel this evening. This video has perfect pace, well researched and your narration is excellent - really enjoyed it. Have subscribed! Keep up the great work Ruairidh!

As a really old conservative American, I will agree that I much prefer the original British design over the abstract art, which did look colorful [but meaningless] in my eyes. Maybe it is just my age, but I have always liked the stoical image, characterized by a calm, austere fortitude befitting the UK that I know. 😊

The World Tails liveries are pretty cool (my favourites are the current "Chatham Dockyard" livery, "Bennyhone Tartan", "Martha Masanabo" and "Delftblue Daybreak"), but at the same time, the Landor livery was a very hard act to follow, and it's one of my favourite liveries used by any airline. Very sharp, clean and it carried a certain air of elegance about it that most of the World Tails couldn't match.

Some of these liveries are better than others. My personal favorite are the Chelsea Rose, Wunala, and Rondevu

As a kid in the early 2000s I thought the Chatham Dockyard livery on BA 777s looked ugly. Then I started watching Air Crash Investigation and older British TV shows which heavily featured planes the Landor livery and I thought it's one of the coolest thing I've seen painted on a plane. Somehow, my mind skipped a huge portion of BA history because only today I found out that they essentially tried doing this. As an adult, though, I completely understand BA's reasoning for doing this kind of stuff. Here in Malaysia, our big two Malaysian carriers, Malaysia Airlines and Air Asia, were doing the same thing for certain planes. Hibiscus livery for one of the MAS 747s and LAT Comic livery for one of the AA 737s are just some of the things I fondly remember being awestruck upon watching. It's locally and internationally celebrated due to its intricate design which featured two notably significant Malaysian things: The hibiscus flower, and the LAT Comic. Here's where our carriers drew the line though: They only put on custom liveries for a few aircraft. Aeronautic paintjobs are already expensive, and further customizations with the colour palette meant increased costs. I'm no expert on guessing public opinions, but I really think that Project Utopia could be successful if they only painted certain plane models. That way, if the public didn't like it, there wouldn't be a lot of losses in repainting the whole tail section for a large number of fleets.

Having some experience in brand and logo design: nope just nope. Those otherwise lovely artworks / patterns, just take to damn long to recognize as BA. The KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle should be any brand designers religion imho.

On the airfield I flew out of, we called them "Baboon Arse"

The two retro planes look stunning

Ironic that the design looked so marketing led when they were presumably trying to get away from that kind of thing through looking "less corporate".

Thanks for the background info on that, I always wondered about that.

@9:40 It's not Design-gate, it's Des-ig-nate! :-/

A BA captain in the late 90s told me that Water Dreaming was known as Bob Ayling's Arsehole.

Landor was indeed one of the most iconic liveries in history. As was the entire brand identity of BA at the time. Discarding it may have been one of the blunders of the century as far as marketing and brand identification is concerned. That said, the World Tails were a magnificent, bold design that signaled the transition to the global village and heralded BA's worldwide appeal. The project did not deserve the backlash it received. In fact, I don't recall it ever being criticised outside of the UK or the plane spotting community, which always has been extremely resistant to change. Personally, as a non-Brit I loved this brief multicultural episode in BA's history. I hope that one day they may feel inclined to bring some of these liveries back in some form.

A stupid idea that made the aircraft look ridiculous.

Interesting and informative. I remember Maggie covering up the tail - spoke for a lot of people. At least Concorde always looked clean, bright and shiny.

Superb upload, great delivery 👍

It genuinely didn’t seem like a bad idea to me, I still think it’s a nice quirk to have and adds uniqueness to the plane. I love the modern livery, I think it was ahead of its time in the 90s and still looks great now.

A classic example of "Go Woke Go Broke"

In reality it is what they deliver as an inside product as opposed to the outside paint job . The only negative was the perceived ATC identification issues , which had they been dangerous would not permitted the repaint from the start

I also thought it was a big mistake by BA & I was never a fan of the World Tails. Landor was the classy livery.

The designs themselves are cool, but I feel like they didn't belong on a plane, but a good idea for a piece might be to use the designs and create an ensemble design with them, arranging them in an isometric grid of tailfins, each with a different version of the pattern, perhaps with a total of 7 spread across 3 rows, printed large.

I think if anything, project utopia was ahead of its time. I bet it would do well today.

The world tails were cool, but they should not have replaced Landor. Too much thinking about being inclusive led to this

As a kid i loved all these different tails was so fun seeing them all

I saw a picture on Google recently of the current fleet in Landor livery. I have to say, even the A380 looked very classy. Great video!

That 1994 livery looks nice to me, very clean.

I really did like the designs. I think it would had gone over better had this been temporary livery campaign.

Surely that design company 'Designate' mentioned at the end shouldn't be pronounced "design-gate"!

Are there any statitics to indicate how much BA's revenues and passenger traffic were negatively affected by the World Tails livery change? I personally liked it and thought it made sense to emphasize how a very high percentage of BA's passengers are not British and how, at the time, BA carried more passengers on international routes than any other airline. I doubt many potential customers decided to switch airlines because of the livery on the aircraft tail. And despite the negative response in the UK, it gave BA a lot of free advertising all over the world.

they should just introduce a new revamped version of the landor livery

The dream liveries came short compared to qantas. Managed to get a hong kong 747 model plane and i keep it in the box

Sometimes I wish corporations would just provide a product/service without the politics.

It's ironic how nearly 20 years on in 2019 all bar 4 aircraft still wear the Chatham Dockyard livery with the tagline 'Made by Britain'

As a former employee, it’s interesting to hear the views I shared at the time, repeated, ie the cynical over reach of marketing ‘trendies’ missing the BA core values and going down a route against their customers feedback. The £60m cost is probably understated, 250 repainted aircraft and all the huff and puff internally wasted trying to persuade staff that removing the Britishness was a good thing. The successful previous campaigns always focused on ‘Britishness’ or our uniqueness, ie operating Concordes, was discarded for marketing speak and gobbledegook and hype. I remember how proud staff used to feel, when previous campaign slogans hit the mark, ‘Try a little VC10-dearness’ or ‘Concorde, arrive in better shape’ or ‘Come home withBA’ emphasised our reputation for technical excellence and British professionalism…..add to that the customer care campaigns and you had buy in from staff. Utopia was a messy, bland and unconvincing waste of money, except for the accidental discovery of the Chatham Dockyard tail logos, which most staff and customers could identify with.

Thank you for this. Very interesting and well presented. Personally, I could care less what design is on the aircraft I fly. I just fly the cheapest fair for the best service. The rest of it is totally irrelevant. But those tail liveries were utterly ridiculous. Yeah, like the average person will have a clue what each one is meant to represent. Whale riding for Canada?!? And the American one makes no sense and has green in it? Dumb, dumb, dumb.

The original example of 'Get woke; Go broke'! lol.

You seems to present Airbuses entering the fleet as being at the time of the B757 and the ‘Landor’ livery. In fact BA did not order Airbus aircraft until 1998. The A320 entered the fleet in 1988 when BA acquired BCAL in 1988 because BA inherited an order placed by British Caledonian in 1983.

I used to own a BA 747 model with the India tail design I think

A sad example of flag shame and terrible alternative designs. They could have replaced the old design with a top hat 🎩 and umbrella ☂️ and had more success.

Those tail designs looked beautiful

"Britishness" as a concept has a thing called "intangible value". IE it's worth something to a brand or company, though as it's not a physical asset you and cannot directly quantify it. I have a bachelor's degree in Air transport Management and the failure of this scheme was discussed at length.

It was a huge PR mistake. The British people are patriotic and nationalistic and proud of their country. It sounds crazy now but the abstract colours were a slap in the face and a visual representation of PC. I was always a keen customer of British Airways but they have lost their way the last few years unfortunately.

I think the current livery looks rather dated, and rather ironically the Landor livery looks far more modern.

Some rather pathetic comments on here far far away from the truth. The idea mainly came from the CEO,s wife who had let’s say a wide perspective of art Ie anything went! The campaign actually started 2 years before being housed in a hanger at Gatwick where some Gold card holders where invited to give their views but had to sign a document not too disclose the contents. Two weeks before the launch staff under the same “secret” arrangement ripped the idea apart but as found out latter no ones views where taken into account. Such where the complaints from staff passed on from passengers the designer attended crew briefings where any sign of lack of love for the designs was met by ridicule by same head of design who on one comment from a cabin crew member was told she wasn’t worldly enough, she was world wide cabin crew!! Various dubious “art” was placed at the font of lounges and arrival areas all favoured by Robert Ayling wife!! Eventually the idea due to huge disapproval was binned and Robert Ayljng left and the airline went back to the highly profitable one it became. PS. Robert Ayling is allegedly colour blind which put paid to a lot of Theories as to why it was taken up. It was the typical new CEO showing he was in charge though in this case driven by his wife

I rather liked that tail art actually. A pleasant change from drab corporate uniformity.

Really interesting and informative video. Thank-you.

I was a fan at the time, and I haven't changed my mind.

Robert Ayling was one of 'Tony's Cronies' - Tony Blair that is. After the BA debacle Ayling slithered off to run some other industries- can't remember what they were- i believe his luck ran out when Blairs did.

This is an excellent insight. Thatcher's PR stunt and - crucially - the Daily Fail and wider tabloid press had a significant role in crafting the British opinion at the time. A slower rollout rather than a big bang would have been a better way to do this.

Landor livery was superb, and didn't need to be ditched. I knew the lady who did the 'Grand Union' design, she lived near the Grand Union Canal in Buckinghamshire, and she bought a house from what she earned from that. But maybe BA was just ahead of it's time - just look at some of the liveries being displayed on planes today!

I actually like it - and the livery for Japan was simply gorgeous. What a shame is that the only bit that remains is the 'torn band-aid' swoopy logo just behind the cockpit. Apparently that is derived from the beautiful art-deco 'Speedbird' logo of BOAC. Perhaps the next time BA decides to have rebrand they could bring that back: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedbird - the 747 that was repainted in BOAC colours looked fantastic.

An excellent Masterclass in brand destruction and marketing suicide. Airlines who return the MAX to services will be doing the same....

I completely understand the brand image difficulties but as an enthusiast I loved them. The BA franchisee in South Africa also had world tails on it's fleet of 727s and 732s. My favourite were the Ndebele schemes.

You should do a video about the BA “Concorde replacement” project where they did exclusive express flights from London City to JFK via Shannon in special small Airbus A318s for a few years… cool while it lasted…

The Chatham Dockyards livery is excellent, beautiful and classic Britain...

The word at 09:41 is not “design-gate” with two G’s. The word shown is spelled D-E-S-I-G-N-A-T-E and is pronounced “deh-sig-neht”, as in “I hereby designate you Queen of Hearts.

Oct 2020 Fined $26M for poor management of personal data.

Such a shame. I loved these tail designs. Flew on a 777 wigh southn african tail in 2003.

from the start, British Airways seems to have never been lucky with it's management.

Fun fact before the project and ending landor there were a hybrid of the chathan dockyard and landor livery the tail and lettering was under landor but the body was under the newer livery

The new image looked great. Those too stuffy to love the bright new colors are what hold change back.