Wednesday 5 August 2015 | 29

Supplier | MHD Partnership

www.route-one.net

Marketing in the bus industry can be a tough job, because there are a lot of things that need to be understood first. For any advertising agency being hired for the first time by a coach or bus company, the amount of knowledge required for producing timetables, for instance, can be daunting indeed – and that can make life a bit harder for the operator, too.

This is where a specialist can be useful to an operator.

MHD Partnership is a small creative firm, based in Swindon, that has acquired a deep understanding of operators’ businesses – including their problems and weaknesses – over the last 30 years. It was started in 1983 by Mark Hows, who is still Director today along with Roland Scull and Mike Fletcher, and one of the business’ early clients was locally-based First Great Western – which eventually led to fruitful marketing partnerships across First’s bus and rail businesses in the UK. It now works exclusively in this sector.

Fresh ideasThe agency has been around for a long time, which has allowed it to gain expertise in the industry. “Operators tend to come up against the same issues and problems,” says Mike. “Whatever the client wants to do, chances are we’ve done something similar for another operator in the past.”

However, that’s not to say there’s no originality. The creativity and freshness of ideas from MHD suggests a young start-up business, not one that has been around for many years. “We’re only as good

as our last piece of work,” says Roland. Adds Mike: “The skill is not so much coming up with ideas – we come up with loads. It’s expanding the idea and adapting it to meet the business’ needs.”

When pitching a campaign to a client, he says, the team usually come up with three ideas – including one “that we know they’ll never pick, but it’s where they could be if they wanted to be.” Sometimes in that situation the client goes for the outlandish one after all. It’s a gamble for the operator, but it’s a gamble that usually pays off, with more exciting marketing that stands out. And, as Roland adds: “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.”

‘Bombarded with it’“The message the operator puts out has to compete with the

thousands of other marketing messages people see every day,” says Roland. “It’s easy for a business to think ‘what do we want to tell our customers?’ But we look at it from the customer point of view – ‘what do I want to hear?’”

Says Mike: “Every brand overestimates how important it is in people’s everyday lives. People are busy, they don’t have time to sit and read everything we put out.”

Roland adds: “We’re all bombarded with marketing messages every day. If it’s going to be effective it needs to stand out, in a succinct and simple way.”

MHD does everything creative – from timetables, maps and health and safety posters, to driver manuals, recruitment adverts and liveries.

It worked on First’s ‘The Star’ bus brand in Hampshire, including coming up with the name, livery

(L-R) Roland, Mark and Mike come up with fresh ideas

Simple, but effectiveOperators can really benefit from a marketing agency that knows the bus industry as well as the MHD Partnership does. The long-established firm has brilliant ideas and thinks about its marketing from the customer’s point of view, as Jessamy Chapman finds out

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30 | Wednesday 5 August 2015

Supplier | MHD Partnership

www.route-one.net

As a showcase of what it can do, the business has brought some long-defunct liveries back to life

“Anyone can come up with an edgy idea, but you need some skill and experience to know if something’s inappropriate,” says Mike. “The ‘gets it’ campaign is appropriate for the market it’s aimed at.”

MHD has also worked with operators and local authorities to promote bus travel as a whole to the public.

Working with operators and authorities on the south coast, it produced a simple but attractive, professional and readable booklet aimed at politicians to promote partnership working as opposed to re-regulation.

It also came up with ‘tryabus.co.uk’ – a campaign orchestrated by Hampshire County Council and funded by the Better Bus Area fund and local operators – to properly promote the bus as a viable method of travel. Roland suggests that many people simply don’t know that some buses in the area offer leather seats, Wi-Fi and power sockets. “Some people haven’t been on a bus since they left school,” he says. “To achieve the holy grail of modal shift, you need to tell them – if you haven’t been in a bus recently, you should give it a try, you might like it.”

There’s no reason why a nationwide campaign in the same vein shouldn’t be rolled out, says Mike. “All bus operators want market growth; they would all benefit from it,” he says.

Get it right firstUltimately, the key to good marketing is to get the product right first, Mike and Roland say. Operators investing a lot of money in newer, more environmentally-friendly buses, and better training for the drivers, find that marketing and growing the market are easier.

“If you’ve got a good product, good advertising will improve its success drastically. But if your product is flawed, advertising, no matter how good, will only kill it off quicker,” says Mike.

“If you can make sure everything’s right in the first place, it’ll show the benefits of bus travel and give passengers a better perception of the industry as a whole.

“The product is getting better all the time. That needs to be communicated to the public.”

l www.mhdpartnership.co.uk

between them.”One thing the firm believes in

is the power of traditional print media. “Social media has a place, but it’s not the be all and end all,” says Mike. “It’s not as powerful as traditional media.

“With social media you have metrics – ‘this got so many clicks’ – and that’s great, but are they even real people? Did they go on to buy a bus ticket?

“We don’t just do something because we think we should, because everyone else is doing it. We think of the customer.”

Adds Roland: “It’s easy to get caught up with the newest shiny thing.

“Two years ago QR codes were the big thing – they were everywhere, including on bus adverts. You don’t see many QR codes now.”

Campaigns with an edgeMHD is responsible for numerous simple, memorable campaigns, usually with an ‘edge’ to make them stand out: First’s ‘beans for students’ campaign springs to mind, as does another First campaign along the lines of ‘John gets it everywhere’...

and promotional material.To showcase its capabilities, the

firm has recently taken some of the defunct liveries of long-gone bus companies and revitalised them for the modern world, so operators can see that there’s more than one way to make a bus look striking and attractive to passengers.

The liveries can be seen on its website, along with other examples of the firm’s striking work.

When it comes to designing posters and other messaging, the key is to deliver only one message at a time, says Roland – otherwise it’s equivalent to throwing three balls at once to someone; chances are they’re not going to catch any of them. “For people to see and take in your marketing, you have to a) get their attention, and b) give them a single message,” he says.

Traditional media“We always think about the customer, and what they’ll understand,” says Mike.

“Operators can get so caught up in operations that they forget that the most important thing for customers is just getting to work on time.

“Our job is to bridge the gap

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} We’re all bombarded with marketing messages every day. If it’s going to be effective it needs to stand out ~

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