Mind your Tone: Ryanair's tone of voice is altitude with attitude

KNOW THYSELF - Know thyself. It's the key to a happy life and it's a key to a successful brand.

At NOAN, we often advise small business owners to really work on audience definition, to knowing their audience, because your audience defines who you are as a brand. If you don't know who you're serving, you don't know who you are as a business. And if you don't know who you are - how can you introduce yourself to anybody? (i.e., how can you possibly go to market in a cohesive way?). So all businesses need to go back to ancient Greece, and ensure that from C-suite to factory floor they know they damn self. 

Ryanair knows itself. 
Decades as Europe's largest low-cost airline have made it a sharp-elbowed brand, unapologetically no-frills. The brand takes its cues from pugnacious CEO Michael O'Leary, whose aggressive, remorseless, relentless energy over more than two decades has defined its culture and brand. Ryanair's success comes from its absolute committment to making seats on planes cheaper than ever, and attacking anyone who tries to make that more difficult. Everything it does rolls up to that concept, and if you don't like it, they're fine with you paying more money to go fly with someone else.

Unsurprisingly, its communications have been consistently edgy, if not entirely pushy. Ryanair knows itself very, very well. And that gives it the confidence to take pot shots at its critics, even when those critics are literally sitting in a Ryanair plane seat. 

You may not like the tone, but it's textbook Ryanair, and exactly what people expect and love from them on social. The engagement it generated bears that out. The Twitter user, Steve Merry, is your average online punter, a meagre 381 followers on his account. This anti-Ryanair tweet was never going to do the brand any damage. But with a little Twitter judo and an iron-clad sense of brand self, Ryanair converted Steve's barely-known knees into a massive earned media success. 7.7 million views on the picture when we counted. 66,000 likes. Brand-supportive responses from Ryanair fans outnumbered the negative by a ratio of at least 10:1. And the likelihood is that Ryanair will recycle it many many times to max out the potential for reach (see the video interview below)

It takes supreme confidence to execute a seemingly simple thing like this, and you can only do so without huge risk of blowback if you have clearly defined your brand's tone of voice and understand how your key audience is likely to react. Ryanair knows there's going to be a bunch of hateful responses among the cheerleading. Ryanair's OK with that, because Ryanair also knows the haters all quietly fly Ryanair when it suits them and the amplification they get from them is, on balance, a win.

THE TAKEAWAY: The better you define your brand positioning and your audience segments, and understand how your messaging is likely to connect the two, the more confident you can be in taking some risks in how you communicate.

GO DEEPER: Watch the below video to hear Ryanair's former head of social describe how they built that comms culture into a social media behemoth.