Really understand the behavior and motives of your customers before promoting transportation options.
I came to the transportation demand management (TDM) industry after an eight-year stint with the local daily newspaper, working as a marketing analyst in the circulation department.
My time there corresponded with massive changes in the newspaper industry brought on by new ways of delivering information, by skyrocketing fuel costs that drove up delivery expenses, and by plunging advertising revenues that challenged – and continues to challenge – the viability of newspapers, particularly in small and medium markets.
I have now been director of RIDE Solutions in Roanoke, Virginia, for as long as I had worked for our local daily, and, during that time, I have applied much of what I learned in the newspaper industry to our program. Mostly, it has been a matter of learning from the newspapers’ mistakes, though there are some things that newspapers – and newspaper employees – did particularly well that have been worth replicating.
Here are three important lessons that I think the newspaper business has to teach the world of transportation choice.
USE YOUR OWN PRODUCT
Journalists are voracious consumers of information. They read their own paper, they read competitors’ papers, and they read out-of-market papers to see what other people are doing well. They read magazines, the internet, and any medium by which news is getting to their customers and potential customers.
And it’s not just the journalists – throughout a newspaper, everyone from advertising salespeople to customer-service representatives are expected to read the paper each day, to understand the product, and be evangelists for it.
The result is that, across the business, employees know their product inside and out, they know what their competition is doing, and they know how to explain the paper to their customers. For a product that changes every day, this is vital to becoming effective advocates for the value of the newspaper.
At one of my first Association for Commuter Transportation conferences after starting at RIDE Solutions, in a session on basic marketing principles, the speaker asked the audience to raise their hands if they actually carpooled, took the bus, or biked to work. A distressingly small number of folks did so.
When it comes to marketing behavior change, I believe it’s critical that, like newspaper employees, we personally understand not just the benefits of transportation choice, but the process that a person who explores it undergoes: the decisions they have to make, and the challenges that occur when things just don’t work for them. If we’re not using our own products, we don’t understand their flaws and how to improve them. In our case, this can be particularly important, since the flaws may belong to products that we don’t actually control – like the cleanliness of a bus, or the state of repair of a park-and-ride lot.
Most customers who try to switch modes and fail will never tell us why, so if we’re not out there doing it ourselves, we are going to suffer huge gaps in information – gaps that could mean we are spending time and money on marketing a service that simply doesn’t work.
Further, in your own life, would you trust a salesman who admitted he didn’t use his own product? Being able to tell personal experiences of the benefits of carpooling, transit, and cycling give your pitch and your program credibility. I can’t count the number of times I have given a presentation to a group of employees and have countered objections of, “Well, you can’t do that …” with “Actually, I did, and I do, and here’s how you can too ….”
Within your program, whatever form it takes, you should set a goal of having your staff meet or exceed the mode split you want to see in your community. If you can’t find a way to incentivize and educate your own staff, it might be exceedingly difficult to convince others outside your organization.
As challenges to the newspaper business mounted, mostly from online news, editorial pages across the country ran columns, penned by editorial staffs and publishers themselves, about the importance of the newspaper to our society.
Newspapers, they said, served a critical role in democracy by informing voters of the issues facing them. Newspapers, they said, served a critical role in local communities by investigating and reporting on issues within government and business that affected the average person. Newspapers, they said, were best equipped to hold policy makers and business leaders accountable.
In each of these columns was reflected an attitude that was prevalent in newsrooms across the country: that newspapers were self-evidently good and necessary, and that it was simply the obligation of people to hand over their money for subscriptions. Buying a newspaper was “the right thing to do.”
Trying to guilt-trip consumers has rarely been an effective marketing strategy. Newspaper leadership, having dominated the information business for so long, saw buying a newspaper as an act of citizenship, almost a moral endeavor. Meanwhile, they ignored the flaws in their product and the rise of various forms of competition. Subscription sales dried up, and as circulation numbers shrank, so did advertising dollars.
In TDM, we know that what we do brings a range of benefits to our communities and beyond, touching everything from climate change, to air quality, to public health. We know we are doing “a good thing.” But don’t assume that these benefits are self-evident or even important to your commuters or your stakeholders, and be careful about using them as a selling point.
Study after study shows, for example, that environmental benefits are rarely a main selling point for any product – whether you’re talking TDM or dishwasher detergent. I recall a cyclist once telling me “Say whatever you want about bike commuting, but for God’s sake just don’t tell me it’s good for me.”
People need to be told how the product or service you’re selling them – and, face it, we are selling a product – is going to improve their lives, make them happier, or make their day easier. They need to be told how it’s an improvement over what they’re doing now, and they need to have a clear path to change. They don’t want to be told that they have a responsibility to do what you’re telling them.
Newspapers tried to tell consumers they simply had an obligation to buy their product, and it failed. In TDM, we are selling transportation choice. Respect their choice and be persuasive, not self-important.
KNOW YOUR COMPETITION
If I had to pick one area where newspapers failed the most, it was understanding their competition.
Their fundamental mistake was confusing the information people wanted to consume with how they consumed it. And so, over a period when the internet was growing, getting faster, and getting into more people’s homes – making it easier for the average person to get information, lots of it, and in incredible depth – newspapers saw their competition as local television and radio, and sometimes even national newspapers.
They slashed news content and added more and shallower entertainment news to compete with television and radio. They shrank news hole – the space reserved for articles – either by reducing the physical paper size or adding advertising space. Even worse, they often gutted regional content in favor of wire news on big national stories – despite the fact that people were increasingly able to get these stories directly from the source on the web rather than waiting a day for a local story reprinted from the Associated Press.
Meanwhile, coverage of important local news was sacrificed, as was the staff of newsrooms committed to those stories, further reducing newspapers’ capacity to give their customers the one product no-one else could: in-depth, substantive exploration of local issues.
Suddenly, newspapers were doing everything that television, radio, and the internet was – just twenty-four hours later. Customers left in droves.
If you were to ask folks in the TDM industry who our competition is, they’d probably respond “the automobile.” But is that really what we are competing against?
We know that most commuters don’t really enjoy the experience of driving. We know that, for many trips, single-occupant travel is more expensive, more stressful, and less healthy than almost any other mode of transportation. And, despite this, it’s the winner over alternate modes in almost every case.
The competition isn’t the car, I would argue, but the trip.
What do I mean by that? The trip is more than the vehicle the commuter takes it in. It is the decisions that lead up to it, the corridor or routes it’s taken along, and what happens at the end. In some cases – perhaps most cases in certain communities – a single-occupant vehicle, despite its flaws, still makes the most sense for a particular trip, not because the commuter wants to, but because they have no safe or realistic alternative.
A trip is a more complicated series of choices, many of which are beyond the control of the people you may be marketing to. Concentrating on comparing vehicles to vehicles could not only miss the point, but possibly alienate potential customers by emphasizing the benefits of modes they don’t even have access to.
To sell behavior change successfully, you have to understand the challenges of your customers’ trips. Rather than simply mass marketing TDM, find ways to better understanding your customer’s needs and responding appropriately.
This is the heart of programs like Portland’s Smart Trips, which provides customized, individualized travel plans for residents of the city. Granted, this level of program may not be possible for everyone, but a good website makes it easy to offer free tools that can help you drill down to a commuter’s challenges.
For example, at RIDE Solutions, we added a very simple Safe Bike Route Request Form, figuring that many folks had already been convinced that riding a bike was the better option, but simply were unsure how to get around town safely.
Now, we regularly field several requests a month, responding to form submissions with a short email detailing possible routes where they exist, or alternatives where they don’t exist, such as park-and-bike options from churches or shopping centers.
Understand that you’re competing against the automobile trip and not simply the automobile, and you can develop tools and messages that address the challenges of those trips very specifically and successfully.
It may seem an odd thing, comparing newspapers and TDM, but I believe the comparison is apt, and not just because I’ve spent so much time in both. They are both products of the communities they serve and, I would argue, play important roles in their community’s health – economic and otherwise.
When newspapers took their neighbors for granted and tried too hard to be something else, their customers responded appropriately. In TDM, we can learn from those mistakes to strengthen our programs and remain a vital part of the communities we serve.
Photos by abrunvoll and Jurg Vollmer