Thomas Cook took a calculated risk with the new brand logo, colours and strapline unveiled this week.
Ditching the familiar ‘Don’t just book it’ tagline signals the end of an era, though the outgoing blue and yellow globe was hardly part of Cook’s heritage, derived as it was from the colours of German group C&N (Condor & Neckermann), which bought Cook in 2001.
No doubt reactions to the new ‘sunny heart’ will be mixed – when aren’t they, when an icon undergoes a change?
The challenge is for Cook to fulfil its promise of putting the customer “at the heart of everything it does”.
The reality is the group must continue its transformation or risk stalling. There seems little risk of that under Harriet Green, so no doubt more will follow.
Cook went into the announcement off the back of a decent trading update to mark the close of the financial year.
The update was compared unfavourably by some in the media with the latest Tui Travel figures, issued at the same time. Yet, allowing for the different starting positions of the companies, there was little to choose between them.
The big two are in fair health, and that is not something we might have expected five years ago, as the financial world fell apart.
That will be scant consolation to the 45 cruise call centre staff at Tui Travel and 75 Thomas Cook Airlines ticketing staff now facing redundancy. But this week marks the close of a good year for both groups, one in which Tui Travel re-entered the FTSE 100 index of top companies and Thomas Cook saw its share price increase tenfold.