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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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National Express: using the web to monitor a rebranding campaign

August 15, 2008

Yesterday we reported than almost nine in ten searches for the top 2,000 search terms in the UK are currently navigational / branded in nature. In our new Managing Your Brand Online report we show that a popular brand will be a well searched-for brand. Therefore any organization rebranding itself should monitor internet searches for its brand in order to measure the relative success or failure of its campaign.

A recent example of this that caught our eye was National Express. Historically the company has been primarily associated with coach travel, but over the last few years it has expanded to include trains, busses and airport transfers. These additional services were added in number of ways, including through acquisition and by winning a number of UK rail franchises. As a result, by 2007 National Express group was maintaining a significant portfolio of brands, including GNER, Travel West Midlands, One Railway and c2c.

On November 11 last year the company announced plans to re-brand these constituent companies under the National Express brand. The process was set in place in December, with the GNER rail franchise becoming National Express East Coast. 2008 has seen the emergence National Express West Midlands (formerly Travel West Midlands) and National Express East Anglia (formerly One Railway), although a number of brands such as rail operator c2c have yet to make the change.

As the chart below illustrates, prior to these changes searches for ‘national express’ had been on the decline, in part due the emergence of competitors to its traditional coach business such as easyBus and MegaBus. However, searches for its brand began to increase in December 2007 and have more than doubled since. I’ve compared searches for ‘national express’ with a number of other strong train brands to illustrate that this has not simply been a seasonal increase. The now defunct GNER brand has also seen searches decrease. However, the increase in ‘national express’ searches has been greater than the decrease in ‘gner’, implying that there is more going on here than just brand substitution. It’s an interesting lesson in longevity of brands to see that ‘gner’ still receives a significant number of searches 9 months after it was retired.

Uk internet searches for national express virgin trains eusostar first great western gner travel brands 2007 2008 chart.png

As the company has introduced a number of new products and sub-brands under the National Express banner, it’s also important to measure whether the breadth of searches for the brand (i.e. the number of search terms we record containing the phrase ‘national express’) has also increased. Before the changes, for the 4 weeks ending December 1st 2007, we counted 909 terms containing ‘national express’, while for the latest 4 weeks (ending August 9th) this has increase to 1,665. Looking at chart below, National Express East Coast has become a brand in its own right. There are also now more searches for ‘national express trains’ than for ‘national express coaches’, implying that the National Express brand is now associated with more than just long distance coach travel.

UK Internet searches for national express sub brands trains rail coaches east cost.png

You can download a copy of or new report, Managing Your Brand Online (written in conjunction with our colleagues at Experian Integrated Marketing) here. And, as always, we urge you to follow Hitwise UK on Twitter to keep up with the latest Internet data and trends.

Posted by Robin Goad at 06:57 AM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Branding | Search | Travel