Eurostar
Eurostar: Speaking to the 25% most brands overlook
When Eurostar set out to ensure its marketing reached all disabled people – a quarter of the population of Europe – our Real Folk Panel identified dozens of practical changes.
The challenge
One in four people in Europe, rising to nearly half of older people, are disabled. Some of them are blind, deaf or in wheelchairs; others have disabilities that are hidden.
Yet, brands often fail to reflect or adapt to their needs, whether it’s on their website or social media, or when they are actually using their services or products.
Eurostar, the cross-European train operator, is among the brands trying to break this mould. It wants to ensure it fully caters to disabled and vulnerable travellers, not just in a one-off campaign or visuals in its marketing, but across its business.
The team at Eurostar know the only way to achieve this is by consulting with people with real lived experience.
Our approach
Eurostar set out to improve its accessibility for disabled people, and our team here at The Folk Group were brought on board to help ensure its marketing reflected the brand ambition.
We made the perfect partner. Our Real Folk Panel includes more than 30 communications professionals with lived experiences that brands often miss. Those experiences are shaped by identities and circumstances such as disability, mental health, ethnicity, sexuality, financial pressures, ageing and other real-life experiences often unseen in brand communications.
The Real Folk Panel is not a focus group, but a collection of experienced consultants whose communication expertise and lived experience means they know what works in high-performing communications.
At The Folk Group we work closely with members of the panel to gather their unique insights and to unearth watchouts but also opportunities that might otherwise go unseen. This gives clients and teams a deeper level of cultural understanding and fresh perspectives.
The impact
Our panel identified dozens of practical changes, many of them easy fixes that would make an immediate difference to disabled travellers. This ranged across:
- Imagery: including better representation of disabilities that are invisible (estimated at 70-80% of all disabilities), for example through using cues like sunflower lanyards.
- Language: to simplify descriptive language which was intended to inspire travellers but risked excluding neurodivergent users.
- Digital accessibility: for instance, to ensure video content was consistently designed with appropriate audio cues for blind people and other users.
- Influencers: to ensure social videos created by disabled influencers – already authentic in themselves – represent more diverse groups, such as older people.
- Working directly with disabled people: to engage them in strategy not just content creation, to ensure consistent and accurate representation.
When such a large part of the population is disabled, such changes can make a huge difference.
We then provided a practical training session, delivered by The Folk Group and one of our Real Folk Panel members, who is blind. We demonstrated precisely how disabled people experience their digital channels and actions to improve them.
Are you connecting with your full audience? Having your comms and marketing reviewed by comms professionals who also represent diverse communities is crucial to ensuring your brand is reaching its full audience. To find out how we can help, get in touch
