Task

Titan has been a retained client of Propeller Studios since 2001. During this time they have grown considerably through securing important government projects and focusing on fleet expansion and diversity of operations.

We have provided extensive consultancy services at board level during the period and this has led to a un paralleled understanding of their values and requirements. Our annual contract with them is negotiated during regular review meetings and becomes a fixed price budget plan which we jointly manage. This provides all of the marketing collateral required throughout the year. They are a dynamic airline and rely heavily on their brand and the image that it portrays. This is not only to passengers who include premier league footballers, politicians, the Royal Family and high end charter passengers but also to other airlines and charter companies who hire their aircraft to fulfil operational requirements.

In addition to this we have written two internet applications for Titan. They manage recruitment activities and investigation of near miss incidents. The success of these projects has led to extensions to them and our latest brief is to extend the capability of TASARS to become a complete quality management system for the company.

Project Management

Towards the end of each year we collaborate with Titan to produce an annual marketing plan. This details each project and marketing campaign along with its deliverables, due date and budget. This plan is managed by us and reported back to Titan at regular monthly meetings.

Four years ago, Titan Airways elected to undergo a significant change in brand. Acting as board level consultants to the Company we discussed the possibility of updating the brand to represent the upgrade in quality of the service that they provided. We developed a series of working groups with the client to cover a raft of deliverables that included: 

• Complete brand change;
• Design of aircraft livery;
• Web site development;
• Uniform design;
• Print items including stationary, brochures, news letters, on aircraft promotional literature and statutory documentation;
• E News letters;
• SARS health and safety reporting system to described CAA brief. 

These working groups arose from the earliest partnership meetings where the way forward and structure was debated. Each working group comprised of senior management of the client, account direction from us, specialist suppliers (such as aircraft paint spraying companies from Germany) and our supply chain partners in photography, copywriting and printing.

The working groups whose topics included problem resolution, supply chain and work allocation, with each group working to develop the best practice solution for their chosen topic. We utilised experience of Prince 2 and the OGC’s Achieving Excellence Guides as well as utilising our own best practices and the experiences to develop template forms and procedures to manage the substantial change.

Each strand of the rebrand was analysed and budgets provided for the work. When approved the activity was programmed using Microsoft project with detailed responsibility tables produced for each organisation working within a project. At this point the specifications were revisited and second stage tendering undertaken to create savings from the overall budget. A good example of a significant saving achieved via this route was the re spraying of the fleet.

Painting Boeing aircraft is an expensive exercise. Not only in terms of the activity but also the weight of paint increases the operating cost of the aircraft. We re worked the original accepted design for the aircraft to reduce the quantity of black paint, saving 500Kg per aircraft and reducing operating costs by £14,000 per year in addition to £11,000 from the work itself.

We established a coherent identity within the organisation through a process of staff and stakeholder votes on options available to them as Titan wanted us to create an image that all stakeholders of the Company could identify with.

Once projects were agreed they were managed and completed inside of the time and cost constraints that were provided and to a better quality than originally specified. Consequently we remain the retained design agency of Titan Airways and their success continues in new livery.