How Trainline Keeps its Brand On-Track with Frontify

A disruptive dilemma

Trainline is Europe’s leading independent rail and coach travel platform. It brings together millions of routes, fares, and journey times from more than 270 rail and coach carriers across 45 countries. People use its highly-rated website and mobile app to search, book, and manage their journeys in one place.

With so many digital touchpoints, it’s essential for Trainline to present a cohesive brand identity. But the Trainline team were finding it challenging to keep everyone on the same page regarding the brand.

Their established tools and processes lacked the flexibility to make and distribute changes to guidelines. And it was not a straightforward process for teams to learn more about the latest marketing campaigns whilst also being able to find the latest on-brand assets.

To further complicate matters, Trainline works with lots of external stakeholders, including agencies. These stakeholders all regularly needed access to the latest content and brand assets, so internal teams spent a lot of time processing asset requests and managing file-sharing permissions.

It became clear that Trainline needed a better way to manage its brand assets, and to find a way to streamline the collaborative process with external partners.

A streamlined solution

Trainline started using Frontify at the beginning of 2020 to build its robust Brand Hub. This Hub is where they created online brand guidelines, which serve as the direction and inspiration for everyone working on the brand. As these guidelines are centralized, when they make updates they are instantly visible and accessible to all users.

The Brand Hub is also home to all Trainline’s media assets. These have been consolidated and organized into 24 dedicated asset libraries, and can be downloaded by any of their users. This has made it simpler for internal team members and external partners to find and use the latest content.

Frontify has also enabled Trainline to transform the way they work with their external partners. The marketing and creative teams use the Creative Collaboration as their “Studio” area, where they create and share content alongside external agencies. Trainline Studio has its own set of brand guidelines used for creative teams’ collaboration. And in the same space and workflow they can approve content, which can then be used for ongoing and future marketing activities, especially campaigns.

The Frontify platform has also given Trainline greater control over asset usage, visibility, and security. Thanks to Frontify’s powerful user management functionality, Trainline can control who sees what, down to a single element on a page. They don't need to create multiple versions of the same document for different user groups.

An on-track outcome

Frontify has become the central home for everything related to Trainline’s brand. The Brand Hub enables everyone – regardless of team, role, or location – to access the digital assets and materials they need. Most importantly, it’s helped Trainline present a consistent brand identity across all its digital touchpoints.

Since 2020, Trainline has seen improvements to every aspect of its brand and digital asset management:

• The Frontify DAM is now home to 37,000 brand assets, organized into 24 libraries
• Provides a centralized home brand guidelines — plus creative teams have their own guidelines version for collaborating with internal and external partners in Trainline Studio – including 15 project spaces
• Brand guidelines are accessed by 29 user groups across 14 different countries
• Stronger brand engagement across the business as the Brand Hub breaks down barriers between users and the information they need
• Less time spent manually sharing brand materials and assets and updating user permissions.

Thanks to Frontify, Trainline’s creative team can be more efficient and focused. With less time spent on low-level admin work, they can dedicate their time to what’s really important: building powerful brand experiences with content they can then easily share, that’s always on-brand and up-to-date – ready for use by anyone that needs it.