Tui has admitted its smile logo “isn’t that recognised and isn’t understood to be a smile”.
But the holiday giant’s marketing director Jeremy Ellis believes its new advertising campaign will change all that.
“We want ownership of that logo and we want to make it really famous.”
Speaking at Abta’s Travel Convention in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Ellis said the new TV ad, which aired for the first time on Saturday during X-Factor on ITV1, also promoted a new strapline for the company, called ‘Discover Your Smile’.
“It is absolutely linked to our logo and absolutely what we want to link to our holidays,” he said.
Tui UK managing director Dave Burling added: “Our new ad is very much building on our previous adverts where the focus was to stress the importance of a holiday and transforming you into a better version of yourself, but it also has a third dimension.
“It is putting a specific identity to the Thomson brand through the use of a smile and that’s important as we compete in the UK market but also in the destinations we operate as our smile is in hotels and at airports, where there are a lot of different companies and so we need the smile to unify all our European markets.”
The new TV advert features a one-eyed teddy bear called Miles (an anagram of smile), who gets to go on a Thomson holiday. Burling said there would be “further iterations” of Miles for turn-of-year campaigns.