How far D.C.’s Metrorail has come from the excellent Silver Line opening dance-party video to the whimpering current “Back2Good” campaign.
There’s no doubt WMATA is at least being realistic, but as Marc Ferris writes to the Washington Post, “What company or official entity – public or private – strives to be good? No publisher would release business books titled ‘From Fair to Good’ or ‘Good is Enough.'”
Mobility Lab agrees with the general sentiment that transit agencies better have some better messages in store.
Here are some additional thoughts about Ferris’s commentary. He writes:
Showing slick videos that tout minor successes will hardly bring the troubled Metrorail system out of the frying pan of public opinion. The feeble Back2Good campaign displays a jarring tone-deafness to the magnitude of the public-relations firestorm that jeopardizes Metro’s future by contributing to falling ridership and an inability to raise adequate funding.
This may be true. But to give Metro at least some credit, let’s assume there is a communications strategy in place here. It might go something like this. “We’ve lost so many customers (note: they should be viewed as paying customers, not riders or peons or something else) that we have to do something. Let’s be realistic and roll out a self-deprecating message for starters. Then, after we’ve made fun of our incompetencies for a period of time, let’s begin to get really aggressive to again become THE go-to transportation option for the D.C. region.”
That would be excellent, and it’s why many of us are giving Metro the benefit of the doubt and some slack for the time being.
But as Ferris writes, the window for mediocrity may not last much longer. As SafeTrack work has wrapped up, Metro rides might be getting a little less frustrating. And some stations may be getting less disgusting (Union Station, for one, seems to be considerably brighter these days).
But are those somewhat-subtle changes enough? Remember, competing for transportation customers in D.C. isn’t getting any easier. People can choose between their own car, Uber, Lyft, Via, Metrorail, buses, Capital Bikeshare, Sprynt, Car2Go, Zipcar, and their own bikes and feet. Probably add autonomous vehicles to that mix soon.
Given that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s tepid marketing campaign is called Back2Good and that the short vignettes reiterate smiley-face messages, it’s almost insulting to assault captive riders this way.
He’s right, transit agencies, including Metro, can no longer mess around with anything less than inspiring and genuine marketing.
But Ferris misses the mark elsewhere in his commentary. Spending money on video, radio, web, and print promotions is more crucial now than ever, as long as the messaging and quality isn’t all wrong. It seems that just about every week, a transit agency is being criticized for awful victim blaming or simply uninspired messaging.
Transit has so many positive messages about safety, productivity, health, hipness, cost savings, and sustainability that wasting money on talking points like Back2Good and See Something, Say Something seem like truly wasted opportunities. As more and more people become enticed to move their commuting lifestyles into living-room-like wifi road cruisers, the time couldn’t be more important to try to get them into other and better transportation lifestyles.
Read the rest of Marc Ferris’s commentary in The Washington Post
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