Transit Branding: Change minds. Train minds.

Today, transit agencies across the US are taking an active and creative role in their approach to ridership promotion and branding. With a massive shift in design and communication technologies, urban development, and a cultural shift among young professionals, new ways of communicating transit benefits have evolved. With our current culture's love affair with the car, the only way to win the battle with this stiff competition is to reprogram public sentiment...not only change minds, but train them.

There's no such thing as a silver bullet. It's never just one thing, it's always multiple things working together in order to properly communicate who you are and why you matter.

In our years of experience, we've found that the "cool factor" is very relevant to the younger demographic and should be used. Training them to think different about transit is the key toward building what we call "transit champions." This group will not only ride religiously, but tell their friends and families about their experience as well, becoming evangelists. Brand cultivation and marketing to this mother-load of new riders should be each and every transit system’s main goal and objective. Their success will depend on it.

We all know that discretionary riders are the ones who can make a transit agency truly successful. This means every consumer touch-point is important and valuable toward breaking through the media clutter that surrounds this target: from marketing, advertising, and communications (both internally and externally), smart planning, and strategy, to tactics like correct naming, packaging, signage, collateral, copy-writing, advertising, uniforms, and visual design. Every piece of your program should be reviewed and considered.

It comes as no surprise that in order to develop a sophisticated marketing plan with goal-driven, tactical implementation you'll need a team of seasoned professionals to help show you the way.

As we work with many transit groups from all over the country, we continue to see firsthand how branding is making a real difference in customer perception and change of behavior. We joke with our clients and say, "If we can sell transit, we can sell anything." They usually laugh because they understand how difficult change is. They understand the corporate transit culture and how hard it is for transit agencies to embrace innovative marketing techniques. It requires a significant shift in gears, because most agencies focus on service: complex tasks of routing, scheduling, and deployment day in and day out.

Transit agencies contemplating a new branding program will be well served to include a qualified branding firm in its seminal planning stages and initial meetings. The branding firm’s experience and helpful focus will benefit transit agencies enormously as they plan for increased ridership and better brand awareness and perception.

4 Steps to Successful Brand Planning

We believe consistent branding, advertising, and marketing are the keys to enjoying short and long-term, sustainable public awareness and participation. Below are our 4 steps to get you there:

1. Create, gather, and analyze research for strategic meaning. 
2. Select the factors that will most likely influence your marketing. 
3. Make a distinction between goals, strategy, and tactics. Goals are desired results systematically achieved through the implementation of the strategy and tactics. Strategy is a big picture view of the entire forest, not the individual trees, of how a goal should be achieved. Tactics are actions you take to execute the strategy. 
4. Implement these distinctions and heighten your ability to succeed. 

Simple Steps to Better Brainstorming

A group brainstorming process is a powerful and calculated way to create new ideas, solve problems, motivate, and develop teams.

For “out-of-the-box” thinking, structure and follow these guidelines.

1. First, define and agree upon the objective (keep it simple).
2. Agree on time limitations and then stick to it. 
3. Begin with a series of thought provoking questions and/or suggestions.
4. Categorize, condense, combine, and refine the answers and thoughts. 
5. Analyze the possible effects and results.
6. Prioritize a list of options and rank them appropriately. 
7. Agree upon action to be taken and time-frame. 
8. Control and monitor follow-up. 

The facilitator must encourage everyone to participate, dismiss nothing, and prevent others from dismissive actions as well.

During the random collection of ideas the facilitator must record every suggestion on a flip-chart or sticky notes to hang. At the end of the time limit or when ideas have been exhausted, use different colored pens to categorize, group, and then connect the random ideas. Refine the ideas by making new headings or lists. You can diplomatically combine or include the weaker ideas within other themes to avoid dismissing or rejecting contributions.  

Remember brainstorming is about team building and motivation, too. You don’t want it to have the reverse effect on some people.

With the group, evaluate and analyze the effects and validity of each idea on the list. Then develop and prioritize the ideas into a more finished list. Agree on what the next actions will be, a timeframe, and who’s responsible.

After the session, be sure to monitor and give feedback. It’s crucial to develop a clear and positive outcome, so that people feel their effort and contribution was worthwhile. When people see that their efforts have resulted in action and change, they will be motivated to help again.

Bricolage - Pulling a large rabbit out of a small hat by the power of branding

"Just Do It." Chances are, you know the company behind this statement. Images of sports shoes and apparel, swooshes, and athletes fill your mind. More importantly, though, you know what the tagline implies. "Just Do It" is now a cultural idea, a way of life, a representation of athletic effort, of competition, of sweat and grit and determination to push one's body to its limits.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, famed author, lecturer, and improvisational violinist, discusses the French word bricolage in his book, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, and equates it to what engineers call elegance, or a system in which something with a very complicated nature is diluted into a simpler representation. Bricolage may produce "a single line of thought [that] has a great many implications and outcomes."*

Nachmanovitch would label the creators of Nike's famous tagline as "creative chemists." He writes that through the process of bricolage, "we take the ordinary materials in our hands [in this case three small words and a period] and turn them into new living matter - the 'green gold' of the alchemists."**

Just as Nike's brand image is elegantly found in "Just Do It," all great brands are birthed from, bathed in, and interwoven with bricolage (e.g. the Rolex crown, Apple's bitten apple, Ferrari's red.) The goal of the master brand strategist is leveraging simple tools to attain complex feelings - i.e. gut reactions to a company that is forever etched in the consumer's mind. Just as "Beethoven crafted his own music, to an amazing extent, of nothing but scales,"* so the medium of our art, whether a logo, tagline, brochure, or website, works within the whole—through the process of bricolage—to create something far more powerful, the "green gold" of all commerce and industry: the memorable brand.

*p. 86, Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art 

**p.87, Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art