Progress after the pandemic

IPA Effectiveness Awards Case Study 2024

Passenger volumes on LNER (London North Eastern Railway) fell by 95% in the first year of COVID as many people reverted to using cars for any journeys. As pandemic restrictions eased, LNER aimed to recover faster than any other operator by communicating rail travel gives you a feeling of making progress because of the things you can do from a train seat. Since rail travel continued to be complicated by strikes and engineering works, creative and media needed an agile approach. Overall, LNER outperformed its category, and kept growing. Communications generated an estimated 3.38m incremental journeys in 2021-2023, worth £134.6m of revenue.

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Client Statement

Cate Dixon, Senior Advertising & Partnerships Manager, LNER

As a business, we made a confident choice to invest strongly and quickly in advertising post-pandemic to help drive our recovery. However, it was also an informed choice – the result of having rigorous consumer insight, econometrics modelling and ad & brand tracking in place. This data helped us create work that was appropriate, effective and agile, allowing us to pivot quickly to changing circumstances. Insight and learnings from our COVID recovery have informed our approach to advertising investment through the recent period of industrial action. We’ve invested through adversity, achieving strong returns from our advertising throughout this challenging time for rail where customer confidence has been negatively impacted.

We also now have an even greater understanding of the role our brand – and the communications we put out – play in driving behaviour change. During and after COVID-19, how we spoke to people, our media-mix and how we responded to change with agility were crucial in giving people the confidence to travel by train again. Today, as we continue to navigate industrial action, disruption and other challenges or opportunities, these considerations remain just as key. Alongside bold decision-making, doing what is right for our customers and leading rather than following the industry.

Now that we have steered people back to rail and embedded our brand in people’s minds, we want to reignite people’s love for train travel with LNER. We continue to use distinctive, impactful and appropriate communications to drive sales and revenue, learning from our post-COVID experience to deliver short term returns. However, we now combine that with a focus on long term sustainable growth and have evolved our creative approach to build greater emotional attachment with the brand. Our post-pandemic recovery has enabled this longer-term, ambitious thinking.