Driving our communities
Brand / Design / Advertising / Radio / ECRM / Social
The Challenge: Increase awareness of buses as a crucial sustainable resource for everyone
From ‘bus w***er’ to Thatcher labelling ‘over 25’ users as failures, the bus has long suffered with a reputation problem. Perceived as something you only use as the last resort.
What if we could make taking the bus into a positive choice? This was the challenge set to us by Go-Ahead, one of the UKs biggest public transport businesses.
A Simple Solution: Buses drive communities for everyone
There weren’t many positives to come out of the Covid pandemic, but there has been one welcome benefit – a renewed sense of community.
Recent research has shown that nearly 75% of us now feel part of community, with more people planning to actively do more to help their local community.
Inspired by this, we created the ‘Our Bus’ campaign which positioned taking the bus as a positive choice that you can make to do your bit for your local community.
After all, riding the bus helps local businesses, creates local jobs, helps keep air clean and ensures the bus service stays available for those who need it most; but also, if we don’t support our local infrastructure, it will be lost to everyone.
To manage costs, we produced a toolkit of marketing materials to allow local operating companies to produce and implement the campaign with the assets as required.
Powerful Results: The test area around Bournemouth increased passenger traffic by about 17% year on year
Community isn’t about brands and big corporations – it’s about people.
Because of this, the Our Bus campaign avoided the ‘corporate’ brand identity of normal bus communications and instead used vibrant, hand-crafted creative approach which delivered a strong sense of humanity, positivity, and togetherness.
Following significant success with the test, more areas adopted the campaign successfully.
