Spreading your branding dollar too thin

Opinionated Marketer emeritus John Whiteside sent me a link to a Houston Chronicle blog post on a public transportation branding controversy that’s occurring in Houston.

METRO is the overall name and brand for their pubic transportation system. I’ve been there, but don’t really know anything about Houston’s public transpo, but I don’t think they have subways/rapid transit/commuter trains. Mostly buses, I’m guessing, maybe some light rail. The transportation that most of the public uses, I’m also guessing, is the automobile - it’s such a huge, sprawling city that’s had most of its growth in the car and highway era. (One of the benefits of living in a more mature large city is that they tend to have relatively decent public transportation. Much as we complain in Boston, we have it pretty good. It is entirely possible to live in Boston and its near burbs and be car-free. I suspect that’s more difficult in Houston.)

Anyway, the Metro has a couple of services that’s its going to be branding separately.

One is an express bus service, which will have its own color scheme, name (Quickline), and symbol - racing rabbits. (Whether separate branding of different services is the most sensible approach for a public transport agency to take, the idea of a bus service using a racing rabbit is clever, when you put it in the context of the most known bus brand, Greyhound.)

The other service - which is the one generating the heat is the Metrovan vanpool service, which is being rebranded as STAR, with the METRO logo downplayed (but still in play).

The METRO board chairman, David Wolff, isn’t happy. He wants the focus to be on the overall METRO brand.

Others (including the agency that came up with it, of course) argue for the new brand, some suggesting that the METRO brand is so associated with fixed routes, that the flexibility of the STAR van service (the routes are customized for each pool) would be overcome by it.

I think I’m with Chairman Wolff on this one.

Other than for major consumer products, spending a lot of money on separate branding exercises seldom pays off. Most B2B products are known by the company name, not the product name. And, as for public transportation, I’m guessing that folks in Houston will either end up calling the STAR service the “vanpool”, and the Quickline will be called the “express bus”.  So why not put the money - which is probably in somewhat short supply these days - to give the overall brand a boost - especially given that the public will end up calling it whatever they end up calling it.

This is certainly the case in Boston. The overall public transportation outfit is the MBTA (Mass Bay Transportation Authority, I think).  They’ve done a lot of branding around the “T”, with a logo of a T in a circle. (I’m too lazy to dig one up for you.) This works pretty well - when you see the T symbol, you know it’s public transportation, whether it’s rapid transit, the bus, the commuter train, or the boat. The branding is reinforced by the use of “Charlie Cards”, the smart cards used to pay your fares. It’s not fully interchangeable now - my Charlie Card works on the rapid transit and the bus, but I have to use separate Charlie tickets for the commuter rail. But the look and branding is consistent, and I think they’re working on cards that are usable across all elements of the system.

While the “T” branding is pretty consistent, Bostonians end up calling the different services what we end up calling them: rapid transit is “the T”, the bus is “the bus”, commuter rail is “the train” (never confused with non-commuter trains, which are referred to as Amtrak/Acela, or “the train to Portland”). The commuter boats - and I’m not sure which ones are run by the MBTA and which ones aren’t - are pretty much called “the commuter boat” or “the ferry.”

Given human nature, Houston’s METRO might be wise to pump the METRO brand, and not go to the expense of promoting separate sub brands, that no one will end up using.

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