Acela means business...

…Or so the new “Take Off” advertising campaign for Acela Express would have us believe. And maybe they’re right. According to the New York Times, 75% of travel between NYC and Washington DC occurs on Amtrak trains. And Acela ridership specifically accounts for nearly 3.4 million passengers on Northeastern corridor rail transit every year.

Here's a video from the campaign:

When Acela was launched in 2000, it focused on business travel with its offer of speed, efficiency and flexibility. Today, the new “Take Off” advertising campaign hits this proposition well, with a sharp elbow-jab toward the Northeast corridor airlines that comprise the main competition for the business travel dollar.  But the “Take Off” campaign pitches Acela even more ambitiously – it speaks of “reimagining business travel”. We wondered if Acela is really doing that and what it would take.

To create a brand experience that delivers on that promise, Acela needs more than a well-articulated ad campaign. They have to start looking for ways to use innovative spaces, better services, and powerful partnerships to shift the current perception of business travel time from “wasted” to “optimized.” Here’s how we’d get started...

The basics matter

In some ways, today’s Acela merely represents the basic standards that business travel should be delivering. What could their “reimagined” business travel look like? Could Acela be the ‘ultimate mobile office’, and what would it take to be that? Maybe it isn’t so much about luxury or premiums, but about the most reliable basic necessities.

Could Acela ensure that every passenger has a super clean and comfortable seat that doesn’t remind you of the 3.4 million other passengers who are using them? And of course…a working power outlet, maybe even two per passenger?

And how about consistently reliable hi-speed Wi-Fi? While both the Delta Shuttle and many express bus services also offer Wi-Fi, Acela’s ‘ultimate mobile office’ would need to go the extra mile to deliver a fast, consistent service. (Easy for us to say, as we don’t have to figure out the location of cellular towers, router reception, demand load, etc.) Acela could look for an opportunity to partner with a best-in-class mobile Wi-Fi provider, and create an utterly compelling Wi-Fi delivery that locks them in as the go-to choice for Northeast business travellers. Trenitalia’s Frecciarossa, Italy’s state-owned TGV, gets high customer ratings for its Wi-Fi Internet, an experimental network available through a co-operation between Trenitalia and Telecom Italia.  

Delight with fresh food and dining

Given that many busy business travellers often have to travel during mealtimes, quality, healthy food and beverages could go a long way in this “reimagination” of business travel. Would a franchise partnership with Whole Foods or Le Pain Quotitiden enable Acela to differentiate from the low-grade food options served on most airlines? Acela’s café car facilities, compared to airplanes and buses, could provide their brand a real advantage. The ‘ultimate mobile office’ might even offer its first-class passengers the option of hot or cold gourmet meals served directly at your seat. They could take a cue from Virgin Rail’s Intercity line in the UK and the TGV in France for example, which both offer a gourmet food service that creates a distinctly enjoyable travel experience.

Optimizing the space advantage

Given that air or bus travel makes most think of cramped and stuffy space, could Acela maximize its comparative space advantage to help reinvent business travel? We played with some more ideas to put space to work in a way that would change the game.

Conference Call Pods:

Acela’s Quiet Cars are wonderful – no need to blast music in your earphones to drown out your fellow passengers’ important discussions or telephone calls. But given the reality that business travellers do indeed have pressing matters to discuss, could Acela take full advantage of the space offered by a train and provide a car fitted with sound-safe conference call pods? 

Executive Meeting Room:

As time-optimization is high on the list of priorities for all business travellers, wouldn’t it be cool if you could simultaneously nail a key meeting or presentation whilst traveling? Could Acela offer executive meeting rooms equipped with conference table, Okamura or Aeron inspired seats, and a large-format HD screen that connects to a PC for video projections.

Workout Car:

Building on our imaginary executive meeting room, could Acela further optimize its space advantage and offer a fitness car? Maybe partner with Equinox Fitness or CrossFit and install stationary exercise machines so travellers could optimize their time and workout while traveling instead of sitting still.

Legendary service

One of the great things about an Acela journey is the low number of service announcements compared to the seemingly never-ending in-flight announcements suffered on your average flight. Could Acela further focus on reducing travel stress and become known for memorable and delightful employee service? Could they model a program on the Ritz Carlton’s “Legendary Service” training program for employee and customer engagement? Or survey their passengers to really understand what comprises the ultimate in service on-board Acela?  Per our service-announcement point, they might find that less is more. 

21st century rail travel

Rail travel in the US has a long way to go to catch up to European and Asian standards, and perhaps that is more a political question than brand experience. But hi-speed rail tracks that are designed for hi-speed trains would really help Acela deliver on its core promise of speed. And ensure it could truly differentiate from the legacy of Amtrak and freight trains! As the US becomes increasingly conscious of carbon-foot printing (again some way to go to catch up to European standards), hi-speed/hi-efficiency rail travel could give Acela a valid advantage in offering business travelers the greener mode of transport. 

Acela brand potential

We wanted to play with the possibilities that a meaningful brand experience could deliver, and imagine what it might really take for Acela to “reinvent business travel”. By providing innovative spaces, services and powerful partnerships that enable business people to travel and work more efficiently, Acela could potentially reinvent the current perception of business travel time as wasted, and reinvent business travel in a way that delivers high value with a low carbon footprint.

We’re onboard, are you?

Angela Riley is a Strategy Director at Wolff Olins New York. 

The Sentient Brand Experience

Of the 5 Principles of Brand Experience previously explored: Ubiquitous, Social, Semantic, Sentient and Human - there is one that stands out as an opportunity to be owned... Ubiquity - Being across the experience chain is clearly owned by Nike - Nike call themselves a services business, not a sneaker business. They create value around the use of sportswear, not focus on shifting units. Social - Enhancing the experience through the social graph and prompting conversation and shared experiences: The recent Facebook and Spotify alliance. Semantic - Creating meaning from complex data in a way that’s usable by humans - Google Human - Reducing complex technology to the point of democratisation - Apple Which leaves us the fourth principle - that of the ‘Sentient’ brand experience. What do we mean by sentience? Not the often misunderstood conscious awaking of artificial intelligence - but the simple ability to react to, or rather pro-act against context, or put simply, a trigger. Who’s closest? Generally brands involved in Location Based Services, or rather location based Services themselves - the leader so far? With it’s release of ‘Radar’ foursquare has taken a step closer to context awareness - yet Foursquare isn’t really a mass consumer Brand with a clear proposition - it’s more a tool for brands to push to customers, and for customers to interact with each other and the environment driven by simple game mechanics. Most location based services are in fact ‘dumb’ - not dumb in the derogatory sense, but dumb in that most re-act to a single parameter, location, only when asked: press button... receive nearby pubs - hardly clever. No location based service can as yet can re-act to, or more powerfully pro-act against context. What is context - Its a combination of place (environments not points), people (implicit and explicit networks and their collective knowledge) and history (where I and my network have been, were we are now, and where we plan on going) - Where we are, our relationships, collective knowledge, and behaviour over time. Why hasn't this been cracked? The technology required has only just reached our pockets, even with the release yesterday of Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus device incorporating an accelerometer, GPS, compass, gyroscope, light sensor, proximity sensor and barometer we are only just arriving at a real ability to sense the environment in a mass, yet personal way. Layer this with increasingly intelligent, lightweight applications, ever more power-full devices and faster networks and the opportunity only just begins to emerge. The question is, who’s going to take it?

'Branding' at Amazon

It was with great interest that I read the current issue of BusinessWeek, and in particular their article on Amazon entitled "Marketing is for Dummies".

In it, they claim that Amazon refused to contribute to the article because executives there "don't spend much time on branding." An interesting statement, yes, but in reality I'd say that Amazon actually spend a tremendous amount of time on branding, just not in the traditional way.

To quote the article: "By investing back in the user experience, you get high loyalty and repeat usage." To me, this is branding.

As our world changes, the idea of branding is also changing. In an open-source environment where Google, YouTube and indeed Amazon are the first places where people go to check out what brands really offer, then the traditional idea of 'branding' through image making (logo's, identities, advertising campaigns etc) will continue to deliver lower value relative to investments in innovation, platforms and increasing the overall utility offered to the consumer.

In case we needed any more evidence, Amazon demonstrates that this truly is a world where what you do matters much more than what you say.

(Paul Worthington)

So Starbucks have opened a new non-Starbucks themed coffee shop in Seattle. Their claim is that they'll eventually have only three of them.

It's pretty interesting that much of the Twitter traffic on this has been of the "Starbucks brand is so tarnished they have to change it" variety, which if you're not a fan of their coffee is probably pretty tempting.

However, there are two more interesting thoughts. The first, as suggested by Seattlest is that this is going to be a lab where they can test ideas fast and without danger to the core brand. This may well be the case as using market facing labs in locations close to your headquarters is a tried and proven trick. Just ask Bank of America.

However, there may be something else going on here.

When large corporations look at markets they are often looking for the mass proposition. The proposition that will fit the largest number of people, encouraging scale economies and scale growth.

The challenge is that to be "good enough" for a large enough group of people means that you have to compromise on creating a "special enough" experience for a specific group of people. This is possibly why Budweiser has almost no flavor - because it is designed to be "good enough" for as many people as possible, and hence the product cannot be special for any one group.

Starbucks appears to a great example of this in action - as it has grown, it has worn away the edges of specialness in the experience in order to appeal "just enough" to a broad group of people.

Unfortunately for them, this has now brought them dangerously close to the McDonald's of this world, who've begun to eat their lunch.

How to respond?

Well, changing the core Starbucks proposition would be both costly and perhaps a little dangerous (as you'd be messing with the familiar), so adding a new niche proposition or perhaps even propositions may well be a smart move in the search for growth.

This allows them to keep the Starbucks franchise robust and add new experiences to reignite the innovation/growth engine. While it is easy to decry their initial pilot as being derivative, not everywhere has the robust coffee culture of Capitol Hill in Seattle. What may appear old hat there, could well be quite unique elsewhere.

Which, of course, raises interesting questions about the future of innovation for mass brands. As the Internet has very explicitly shown us, mass is really a collection of smaller niches - where the individual consumers within these niches now have tremendous power to self-identify and organize themselves.

As mass players max-out on their potential, they have to look elsewhere for growth. This suggests we may well see more innovation of the kind that Starbucks has done here and not less - where mass brands look for ways to stretch from their core into more specific niches.

The trillian dollar question will be whether mass brands can embrace the specialness which is a defining characteristic of a niche brand, or whether they will need to create whole new brands to do it. So far we've seen examples of three different approaches:

In the extend the brand and try to make it feel special camp, we have Pepsi Natural, which appears to be a very contradictory marriage of brand and proposition. Particularly when we consider established niche competitors in this area such as GUS soda.

Starbucks (as shown in the image above) have chosen a different brand, but with the modifier of a more subtle "inspired by Starbucks" endorsement.

Finally, in the create a new brand in order to be special camp we have Sunglass Hut, who chose to completely seperate their Ilori brand in order to create a completely different experience to drive growth.

It's not clear right now that any one approach will fit everyone, but I'm tempted to think that the more mass - and hence the least special - the experience of the core brand, the more difficult it will be to stretch it into a specific niche.

(Paul Worthington)

Photograph borrowed from Seattlest