Marketing transit

We have a ways to go before I am satisfied with how transit officials think about transit marketing. Too often they think that marketing = advertising but that couldn't be further from the truth. Marketing is about reaching people creatively, and getting your message heard. Advertising is just one piece of the total picture.

This ad from today's Express for the Downtown Circulator is a perfect example of transit marketing that misses the mark.

What does this communicate to you? If you don't know this is for a bus system, you're still not going to know after seeing the ad. Plus, let's be real. Downtown for holiday shopping?

As I was explaining to a WMATA staffer yesterday (although he works in IT), the Circulator has three distinct market segments: visitors; downtown office workers (some of whom live in DC, many don't) both to get to work and to get around downtown during the weekday; and residents (including potential subsegments such as GWU or GU students).

Each needs a different approach to maximize awareness and utilization. And the visitor segment is seemingly hard to reach because every couple days you have different visitors to market to.

In any event, an advertising based marketing "strategy" is likely to be expensive and for the most part, unsuccessful.


As I say, know what you have, what your assets are, what you can promote realistically so that your message isn't rejected afterwards.

My plaintive plea for marketing in the working session on "system integration" (one of four, the others were fare policy, traffic management, and bus stop waiting environments) touched a nerve, and marketing was added to the functional areas to be represented in a proposed "Regional Bus Working Group" bringing together all the area systems to begin working together towards a system that is focused on customers, rather than the providers of the services.

Index Keywords: transit