Brand is the Whole Business

How Virgin Voyages carries its brand strategy through the entire customer experience

We’ve built more than 200 brands at COHN. Brand strategy is our bread and butter. 

After long enough, it becomes something of an occupational hazard. You can’t turn the brand-first thinking off. You see it everywhere, the good and the bad, in every place you go.

I sailed on my first Virgin Voyages cruise a few weeks ago, and it was a master class in what happens when an entire business is aligned around its brand strategy. When a brand is authentic at a DNA level, it shapes everything: who you build for, how you operate, and how you energize your people on the frontlines. Virgin has a top-to-bottom commitment to who they are, and it shines through to the passenger in every part of the service and experience.

Three things stood out: how Virgin deeply understands and targets its audience, how it runs its operation, and how it treats its people. Most companies don’t think of the last two as flowing from brand strategy at all. Virgin does.

Know Who Your Brand is For, Then Design for Them

When Richard Branson created Virgin Voyages, the whole goal was to shake up the cruise industry. As he puts it, “I have been dreaming of starting a cruise line since my 20s, and how I wanted to do things differently. Every single element of every day has been rethought and redesigned.”

Like any good endeavor, it started with research. As an adults-only cruise line, Virgin set out to understand what would bring a 30-to-50 crowd, people who’d never pictured themselves cruising, onto a ship. But here’s the part that’s easy to miss: plenty of cruise lines could have run that same research and spotted the same gap. Virgin could actually own it, because irreverent, design-led, and rule-breaking is who Virgin already was, across music, air travel, everything. The opportunity and the identity matched. 

From there, everything followed from understanding their audience and adapting the traditional cruising experience specifically to them. Want to take some R&R away from the kids for a week and sleep in? On most ships you’d be woken by the day’s activity announcements blaring over a hallway speaker. Not on Virgin. 

They know their sailors treat wellness as part of their lifestyle, so the ships have multiple fitness facilities, outdoor yoga studios, group classes, and juice bars. And when it’s time for fun, nearly everything is all-inclusive, so you’re immersed in the full experience without getting nickel-and-dimed $20 for a wine tasting.

They also know how to tailor the experience to diverse audiences. For example, the goal was to foster an inclusive, energetic environment where everyone feels welcome. This plays out through dedicated LGBTQ+ activities, a diverse “Happenings Cast”, including resident drag queens, in place of a traditional cruise director, and drag brunch at their signature restaurant.

The lesson: Dig into your audience. Go beyond knowing who they are. Understand how they live and what they want, then shape every part of the experience to fit in a differentiated way that your competitors cannot. 

Translate Brand Strategy into Brand Experience

Brand strategy is just the starting point, and it can’t just live in a deck. Category leaders operationalize their brand through people and systems, until it becomes a living, breathing part of how a company operates, day to day, touchpoint by touchpoint. That’s how differentiation shows up in the real world. Virgin Voyages is fully differentiated, and it shows.

It played out most clearly in the parts of a cruise everyone else in the category treats as logistics. Boarding times are strictly adhered to, so there are no lines. The whole process took about 12 minutes. The second you’re on, your room is ready, even if it’s early, so you go straight there and drop your bags. Disembarkation was no exception. What’s usually a cacophony of people digging through a warehouse of luggage becomes, on Virgin, bags organized by deck level. I walked off and stared right at mine, no searching required.

How can Virgin pull this off when nobody else does? Because they understand that these moments aren’t logistics. Instead, they’re an expression of the brand. From the second you arrive to the second you step off, the friction is gone, because someone is spending real time thinking about how each moment connects back to the bigger experience Virgin is selling.

The lesson: Brand strategy is the critical foundation. Then you have to deliver it everywhere. Build your brand into the systems and touchpoints your customers interact with, especially the ones that feel like overlooked logistics. This is where differentiation comes to life.

Your People Live the Brand First. Then Everyone Wants To.

The last thing that set Virgin Voyages apart from every other cruise I’ve taken is how their authentic identity shows up in the way they treat their people, and then in turn how those people treat you.

I talked with a lot of the crew. I’d ask if they’d worked other lines, and where they’d most want to work, and the answer was always Virgin. Why? Because the company is good to them. If you’re sick, someone covers your shift so you can rest and get better. Most cruise lines make employees pay for Wi-Fi. Virgin doesn’t. Small choices like these compound into a crew that truly lives the brand. 

You feel the result of that everywhere. On the third night, a server named Kim took care of us at the Italian restaurant. Three days later, in a completely different part of the ship, she spotted me, remembered my name, asked what I wanted to eat, and said, “Go sit down, relax, and I’ll bring it to you.” She’d been with Virgin six years, and she authentically embodied their service mindset. 

When your people understand and believe in the brand, customers feel it, and something interesting happens: they want to be part of it too. Virgin has a shop on board full of branded merchandise people actually line up to buy. Think about that. The clearest sign a brand is strong is when people want to wear it, to make it part of who they are. Nike does this. The best sports teams do it. And it all starts with the experience, which flows from the people delivering it.

The lesson: Your people live your brand before any customer ever does. Invest in them, treat them the way you want your customers treated, and they become your most convincing advocates. Do it well, and your customers become advocates too, maybe even wearing your brand by choice.

Brand Sets Up Everything Else

As someone who’s spent a career building brands, it’s always energizing to see one fully realized in the wild. The targeting, the operations, the attitude of the crew, all of it traced back to a clearly defined brand strategy.

Companies like Virgin that rise to the top understand that before you can differentiate, you have to invest in defining who you are. It’s the foundation that filters down through everything else. This vision and understanding sets the leading companies apart.

At COHN, we build brands from the inside out, because a brand rooted in who you authentically are actually moves the needle at every level. Get the brand strategy right, and every interaction that follows starts working in your favor.

If your brand strategy isn’t strong enough to translate across your entire business, we can help bring clarity.  Contact our team.