More Riders

Will I be Sexier if I Ride the Bus?

For as long as there have been cars, there have been car ads.

Those ads are generally designed to make an emotional appeal.  They show young, confident drivers cruising around on beautiful and scenic roads.  Depending on the demographic targeted, they project the driver as healthy, free, confident, safe, sexy or the envy of his neighbors.

Car ads tell us that, to fulfill our unmet emotional needs, all we need to do is buy the car that fills those needs.

If we feel bored, overweight, weak, harried, or unaccomplished, there is a car that will solve that.  If we’re scared about our safety, the safety of our children, or even the health of our planet, there is a car that will make us feel better.

Sure, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. 

More after the jump.

But successful car ads, like most consumer advertising, are designed to work in a realm beyond rational thought.  They make us feel like we need the car to be the person we want to be.

Contrast automobile marketing with the messages commonly used in public transit marketing.

Transit marketing, when it exist at all, too often presents practical and rational arguments for riding the bus or train.  As far as I know, nobody has made the ad that tells us we’ll be sexier if we ride the bus.  (If I’m wrong, I NEED to see that ad.  Post a link in comments.)

These well-intentioned but ill-conceived marketing plans tell us that we should ride transit to save money, save time or avoid the frustration of congestion.  If people, on the whole, responded rationally towards marketing, the message would work.

But most people do not make most decisions based on rational considerations and arguments.  It’s not that rational decision-making is impossible.  It is just that information distribution is asymmetric, the emotional appeal is stronger, and besides, who has the time.  (There is an argument to be made that the rational cannot be separated from the emotional, but that is for a different blog.)

For further evidence of the propensity of people to make irrational decisions, just consider the process you went through when you bought your last home.

Transit marketing needs to tap into those emotional decision-making centers of the brain if we’re going to beat the competition.  And have no doubt, the automobile industry is our competition.  Every car ad seeks to steal riders from our buses and trains.  Every car ad tries to convince people that the answers to their problems can be found behind the wheel of an automobile.

The automobile industry spent $9.9 billion in 2006 (according to the Financial Times) trying to convince us that cars will make us feel better.  That’s about $33 for every man, woman and child in America.

It’s unreasonable and irresponsible to expect transit to match that marketing outlay.

But it is perfectly within the realm of possibility for transit marketing, both external and internal, to tap into the same emotional decision-making centers as the automobile industry hits within our current and potential riders.