An ad for “comfort protection” when buying a car in India employs a celebrity to show just how pleasurable and hassle-free the experience of car ownership and mobility will be.
Even more seductive, the latest ad for Cars.com positions the company as “the Tinder of cars,” with such claims as: Cars.com, “where a soccer mom can meet her MVP.”
And it’s not like these compelling ads for the car lifestyle are new. Car companies have always been one of the best – if not the best – at advertising, at convincing you what you need to buy and what you need your life to look like to everyone else.
Even 67 years ago, Ford was smart enough to get the #1 cartoon characters in the land to shill its products. In ads for the the 1961 Ford Falcon, the Peanuts gang talked about the car’s “style, comfort, savings, and fun” benefits and Lucy even said the gas mileage should be inscribed on Mount Rushmore!
What do these ads have to do with public transportation? Unfortunately nothing. While personal autos have an abundance of big money and powerful advertising messages behind them, people who bike, walk, or take transit are left out of the hype machine.
One way that nearly century-long oversight could start to be overcome is with shared e-scooters and e-bikes, which are beginning to get gobbled up by companies like Uber that have money to burn on messaging and marketing. And perhaps one day even car companies could get into the game of promoting shared, shuttle-like autonomous-vehicle fleets.
One opportunity that cities and the public sector (or, at the very least, in partnership with private entities) should look to for winning over people’s hearts and minds with unusually strong messaging is the growing landscape of seamless payment for transit. And another is in the area of making that landscape gamified.
There are rumblings of cities like Columbus, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland moving into “mobility as a service” – making payment of travel information easier to access across all companies that offer services. This would be similar to how Amazon and Netflix make it easy to find movies and TV shows from multiple studios and sources, and customer payment and subscriptions for access to those programs recurs effortlessly.
That would be a great start. But it will mean nothing, and it will replicate past failed efforts to boost ridership (and, more importantly, hearts and minds), if the transit industry fails again to make a big splash upon public launch.
I unfortunately have a strong hunch that transit agencies will fail to market the subscription model successfully. Why do agencies continuously neglect to learn from other industries? The example of the car industry is so obviously what transit agencies should replicate. Year after year (just watch the Super Bowl), car companies have some of the best and most clever marketing.
And, as our contributor John Perry noted last year:
Transit has been defending itself on someone else’s terms for long enough. It’s about time it learned how to sell itself.
Another great marketing opportunity comes from some of the interesting gamification apps that are surfacing. While there are some good transit apps, such as Transit and CityMapper, they have had a tough time gaining much usage by wide, mainstream audiences. Part of the reason is that there haven’t so far been ways for developers to make money off transportation apps. Another part of the reason is that nobody knows that great options like Transit and CityMapper exist.
I just signed up as a beta tester to the federally-funded incenTrip, which will supposedly offer points for taking more sustainable modes of transportation on my trips throughout the Washington D.C. region. (The similar Hytch Rewards has also just launched in Nashville.)
Some of the rewards might include Amazon and restaurant gift cards. That could be a pretty sweet deal for driving at safer speeds that return better gas mileage or for choosing to bike or walk instead of Uber or driving.
I’m looking forward to trying it out soon, but the key to whether incenTrip succeeds or fails may truly be whether it can be marketed properly. It’s unknown how much marketing budget exits for the app. It’s also unknown what the strategy is. But if the history of public-transit marketing ensures us of anything, it’s that we should be worried, very worried, and skeptical that it will take hold in the public’s imagination.
Marketing the myriad benefits of more sustainable transit should be obvious, and should be a slam dunk. It often seems the only people not ready to make it happen are in the public sector (not that there aren’t a lot of truly talented marketers there who could do it if they had the buy in and the means).
According to a recent study of consumers in several countries, including the United States, the majority is “ready to change [its] preferred mode of transportation and pay more to get access to” transportation subscriptions.
It’s time for transit to, as Ray Davies and The Kinks say, give the people what they want.
Top photo by Sam Kittner for Mobility Lab.
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