Frontline Marketing and Communication in Public Transport

Rob Mayo: Director, Human Experience Design, cOlab: Auckland, New Zealand

Entirely interactive, this first session aims at introducing the course, collecting the expectations from participants and briefing the group on the course Workshop ‘Challenge’.

Diane Chiu: General Manager, Marketing & Revenue Management – MTR: Hong Kong SAR, China

Hong Kong’s MTR Network comprising rail, tram and feeder bus services, has long been regarded as one of the world’s best – renowned for its efficiency and focus on quality passenger experience. Although MTR is the largest PT service provider in Hong Kong, the network has to compete with other transport service providers territory-wide for market share and maintain its reputation for providing high levels of convenience to its users.

In this session, you’ll learn how MTR markets its ‘Network Value’ to Hong Kong residents, to the many people who visit the city each year and the ways in which the company goes about maintaining its position as a leading, trusted provider of services essential to daily life.

Martin Kalab: Vice Head of Sales Marketing – Wiener Linien: Vienna, Austria

Marketing and communicating the value of a Public Transport Network isn’t always about selling the efficiencies of the services. It’s equally as much about the value purchasing a ‘ticket’ brings to gain access to the service network and the inherent convenience of using a range of transport modes to get from A to B and to C and D, then back again. Offering convenient services for a range of transport modes that cover entire journeys weekdays and weekends, ensuring the right mode is there for each person’s needs / circumstance and offering affordable ticketing to access those services, serves to convey the network brand in an attractive and trustworthy light. It enables the PT Network Service Provider to ‘position itself well’ with its users ongoing, as well as with the wider general public.

In this session you’ll learn how Wiener Linien in Vienna Austria, has developed and maintained ‘WienMobil’ – a new brand for its multimodal service network (including bike share and EV share) that keeps pace with the changing lifestyles and needs of city residents, even during unforeseen service disruptions.

Mari Flink: Director, Markets – Helsinki Regional Transport Authority (HSL): Helsinki, Finland

It’s well-recognised that a good understanding of the people who use public transport services, is essential for planning / designing the kind of product offerings that will meet their expectations. Traditional methods of market research have enabled understanding of PT Service Users to a certain degree but it is deeper insights into user attitudes and behaviour that creates real value-add to PT service provision.

Using the HSL PT Network in Helsinki Finland as a reference, this session will look at how good insights into service usage have produced:

• Better understanding of user actual needs
• Increased revenue through real-world passenger journey creation

Tasuku Takahama: General Manager, Business Design – JR East Marketing & Communication Inc (jeki): Tokyo, Japan

Using public transport infrastructure and services as revenue-generating marketing and sales ‘tools’, is fast becoming crucial worldwide to sustainably grow ridership and to cement the ‘attractiveness’ and ‘relevance’ of public transport into everyday life – weekdays and weekends.

JR East Marketing & Communication Inc (jeki) have over the years made the generating of public transport service revenue via ‘non-fare’ means, into an art form through developing a deep understanding of how Infrastructure and Psychology work together to effectively generate revenue from PT Network usage.

In this session, you’ll learn how jeki put their PT Network-based marketing campaigns together, how they measure success and how their methods of non-fare revenue generation contributes to funding JR East’s service operations.

Anna Lawrence: General Manager, Marketing & Media Partnerships – Auckland Transport: Auckland, New Zealand

As public transport service providers globally, work to increase ridership, many are making their network design multimodal – to create more effective PT service value and ‘stickiness’. Part of that integrated service approach is to sell the value of infrastructure improvements and also the value of integrated service fares – particularly to companies that traditionally would have encouraged their employees to drive to work.

In this session you’ll learn how Auckland Transport has been successful in marketing upgrades to its service infrastructure and marketing to companies, the value of using public transport to provide affordable every-day journey solutions to their employees.