Johanna Jainchill
With its new ad campaign, Celebrity Cruises has decided to emphasize an icon it always had. The cruise line's new ads will focus on the X icon that adorns the funnel of every Celebrity ship.
The idea to begin focusing on the X to market the brand was something that Celebrity's CEO Dan Hanrahan said was "one of those things that slips right underneath your nose at times, and you don't see it until someone points it out."
"Many of ours cruisers refer to us as X, in a loving and positive way," Hanrahan said. "We had done some research on the brand over the last part of 2010, and it came back to us again and again that the X is cool and the X stands for something really special in cruising.
"Because many people use it to describe us that way, we decided, 'let's let X stand for better and best.'"
The campaign also gives Celebrity a chance to reconnect with its history.
The X comes from the name of the Greek family that started Celebrity before Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. bought it in 1997, when it was called Chandris Cruises.
The "Ch" sound in Greek is spelled with an X.
"People are curious about where the X came from, [so] there's an opportunity to tell a story," Hanrahan said. "It gives us an opportunity to build on our history a bit."
A former Celebrity employee said when RCCL first acquired the brand, it considered x-ing the X altogether. Instead, the company began putting it on the funnels, but in almost 20 years, it has never made it a serious part of their messaging.
Hanrahan thinks the X has the potential to be a long-term icon for the brand and could eventually stand on its own.
"With Target, they took everything off the ad except the logo and that stands for the brand, and that's value for them," Hanrhan said. "We think the X can stand for quality and best and better if we can get it to stand alone a little bit. We think this is an opportunity for something to stand out and cut through all the clutter of cruise and vacation advertising."
The campaign has already become storied -- originally, the ads were variations on an "X the rules" slogan, which was meant to show why Celebrity was different and better the standard vacation.
That tagline was dropped after research found that some people interpreted the campaign to mean freedom from rules and deviating from established norms and policies onboard.