← On Strategy Showcase
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to On Strategy Showcase. I'm Fergus o' Carroll back in Chicago. Hope you guys had a great week. Last week we were in New York City for the final round judging of the Effies, which was a total treat for me to be able to sit in the judging rooms and listen as people debated the different cases was really eye opening and we'll talk about this again in the future. But it was a brilliant experience and thank you to the Effies for allowing me to observe, which isn't an easy thing to do. We are of course the official podcast partner in the effie's brilliant partnership that we love. And we also did a sort of a fireside chat on Tuesday night in New York with Andrew Tindall and Tracy Alford around the Creative Dividend Report. You may remember we did an actual episode on it a few weeks ago. It's now in a printed book form, which was brilliant to have you hold it in your hand. You can read it, it feels tangible. It's brilliant. I personally can't deal with the huge docum PDFs. Tough for me to read that. So I love this book form. You can get the digital book form for free@effie.org if you scroll down on the homepage you'll see the Creative Dividend Report. Get a look at it. It's really good, really strong. Lots of interesting content in there that you can use as a marketer or as a agency strategist to help make the business case for increased investment and help make marketing what we know it is, which is a growth driver, not an expense. So we had fun and then we went from New York into San Francisco. On Thursday night we were live at Uber, which was just a brilliant event with just great folks, great crowd, and thank you to Uber for hosting us. That episode will be, I think out in about two weeks. So, so excited about that. And that was the last episode in this last season's live tour. The next season, which is season three, is gonna start in May and that's gonna be starting at Barclay OKRP in Kansas City. Gonna go to Kansas City. Lots of great things happening in Kansas City. We're gonna be talking on Thursday, May 28, live at Berkeley okrp. And tickets will go on sale in a couple of weeks and then following that, or maybe even before that, we have to figure it out. We're going to be in Minneapolis. Hopefully we've had initial conversation with Carmichael Lynch. Hopefully we'll be there and the date on that will come out a little bit later. So lots of things going on that I'm excited about. So back to today's episode. This is a conversation with Joe McClintock and Nick Doherty. Nick set Wyden and Kennedy, the Chief Strategy Officer at wieden. And Joe McClintock is VP Brand and Marketing at Trainline. This is a conversation about all things strategy. And I loved the fact that Joe referred to Wyden and Kennedy as being strategic creative thinkers. It's a little different twist than creative strategists. It's strategic creative thinkers, which opens up a whole new set of things, which is really at the center of this case, which is building something beyond comms, something that uses comms to promote itself, obviously, but is beyond that. It's thinking about the entire brand, the entire organization, and how the organization can rally around a central theme that's not new for us. We know that as strategists and as marketers, getting to it requires timing within the business and also the great opportunity of the business to believe in it and to rally around it. So if you want to watch this on YouTube, if you're not already, you can watch this and see the creative work on our YouTube channel. We'll also have the creative on our website. You can also watch it there@onstrategyshowcase.com and you can connect with me directly on LinkedIn. A lot of people are connecting to OnStrategy Showcase on LinkedIn which we don't pay any attention to, which is my bad. We gotta change that, which we will in the future. But connect with me directly there. Trying to do the best we can with LinkedIn. LinkedIn is not a great place to be these days. It's creating problems for us, reaching our network. And I think for me, as a company, a platform like LinkedIn that is supposed to be about helping you create a network. I still don't understand why LinkedIn doesn't allow me to communicate with them because I am not getting the reach. And it's a complaint that a lot of us in marketing and a lot of us on LinkedIn are complaining about. They've got to change the algorithm, they to at least allow us to reach our network. The people that have connected with us, I don't understand why they're not allowing us to connect with them. They haven't fixed it yet. Hopefully they will. So we'll give them a shot again in terms of let's connect to us on LinkedIn, but we'll see how this plays out over the next couple of months. And if they actually heed the call. So anyway, back to Trainline. Love to have these guys on Wyden and Kennedy and Trainline. Great conversation, hope you enjoy it. We're going to talk about Trainline. So I think for those of us in the US who are not familiar, Joe, tell us about what Trainline is and whom it competes against.
- [05:42]
B
Sure. Trains are quite big in Europe, so it's a massive form of transport and getting around cheaply and easily and sustainably. And basically Trainline is effectively the number one travel app in Europe for booking train tickets and basically managing your train journeys. So you have effectively have train companies that kind of build the rails, they, they build the trains and ultimately we're a retailer who sits on top of that and actually sells train tickets to customers and manages their journeys. So in the UK, we started in the UK and 20 odd years ago and we were the first digital booking app, as it were, for train Tickets in the UK, about 20 million customers with sort of market, the market leader here and in Europe we kind of went in probably about oh God now six to seven years ago and have taken a market leading position there too. So imagine for those of you that don't travel by rail on a frequent basis, it's kind of like the booking.com but for rail. And we're kind of of that kind of stature and size in Europe.
- [06:49]
A
So how many people or what percentage of people currently buy directly from the train services themselves? Or is that sort of a bygone era?
- [06:59]
B
Oh, it's quite interesting. So the biggest shifts usually in rail travel are when something is significantly disrupted. So for example, in Covid, I think many, many brands were kind of were fortunate to be on the receiving end of a digital dividend. Right. So something meant that you couldn't go to a train station or a train ticket office to buy a train ticket anymore and actually you needed to do it online. And really most of the population, they have moved to online, but there are still swathes of people buying in a ticket office or a train station in the UK and in many European countries. And the main driver of that is like pure habit or apathy. And it's kind of, in a way it's somewhat strange because ultimately by buying online you usually get a cheaper ticket, you get more information, you get journey services and we can manage your journey, you get more choice, you get digital ticketing. So, you know, we've kind of led the way in digital ticketing for rail travel in UK and Europe. We've been on the benefit of some kind of disruption moments Like a Covid and driving people away from old habits. But really we still wrestle with apathy and habit of old ways of doing things.
- [08:14]
A
So, Nick, anything you'd add to that in terms of what Trainline is?
- [08:20]
C
Yeah, the only thing I'd add is that maybe this is for, you know, American audience more than anything else is that in the UK markets it used to be one big rail operator and that rail operator got split up into a million different smaller ones, which was a kind of private.
- [08:39]
A
It was government owned or privately owned?
- [08:42]
C
Privately owned. So it got sold off essentially piecemeal. So you'd have one, one company doing the southwest of England, one company doing another bit of England, all that kind of stuff. As a result, complexity in the market skyrocketed and I guess to Joe's point about what Trainline's role is, it's yes, to sell tickets digitally and be a pioneer of that, but also to minimize the complexity in a market which has exploded with it, essentially. And that's a. A much more customer focused role, I guess. So there's a real need in the UK market and increasingly, to Joe's point, across European markets for.
- [09:24]
A
I suppose there's a real need to draw a distinction between Trainline and other apps, Joe. I mean, as time has gone on, I'm sure that there's been strong competitors and you're winning probably on one level on functionality, right?
- [09:38]
B
Yeah, well, yes, and winning our functionality, but also like trust. We've been doing this job for a long time and it's one of those industries that's quite slow to adopt digital technology and services. So we've kind of been able to kind of take a real leadership position in providing better functionality, better options. But it's also an industry that's heavily disrupted. So effectively what you experience is a great product ultimately in rail, but actually you might not get to your destination on time, it might get cancelled. The price, price changes on a frequent basis. So that complexity, you need functionality, yes, to manage that complexity, but also you need confidence, you need trust that I'm going to pay the right price or the best possible price, that I'm going to get there on time and. Or if there's a problem that something solved for me. So there is definitely. When I think about what the role we play for consumers, the biggest drivers of our success are that we help people find the best price, we help them with delays and cancellations and they feel like as a brand, someone we trust and to do all that for them.
- [10:45]
A
And I mean, when I look at The OTA space internationally, it's super cluttered. I'm surprised they're not in your space. And then I look at people like Uber who are trying to get into your space. So it's not just traditional competitors.
- [10:59]
C
Right?
- [11:01]
B
It's really complicated. It's kind of. I used to work at Skyscan actually, which is a similar product for flights similar to Kayak. So, you know, aggregating flights, aggregating rail. But for us, we're actually the full end to end booking platform as well and customer service engine. With rail, genuinely it is a lot more complicated and a lot more goes wrong in rail. So there are more providers, more services, more effectively ticket options, something like 55 million different ticket options that you can purchase. And you know, ultimately with that complexity, you need a ton of engineers, a ton of data and experience on how to present that in a way that consumers can simply just buy a ticket at the best price and get from A to B with no stress. So you are operating in a much more complex market than say a airline market would be.
- [11:53]
A
Yeah, it's wild to think that it's more complex than the airline industry.
- [11:58]
C
I mean, just to add to that, I cannot tell you the just thinking personally going from my parents home in the south of England to Edinburgh, where a place that I visit a lot, the amount of stress that that idea triggers in me right now buying a ticket, it's, it's ludicrous. It's like the number of options, the number, it's impossible, almost impossible to navigate without a provider like Trainline.
- [12:25]
A
So Nick, what's the, what's the brief that comes in from Joe and Trainline?
- [12:29]
C
Trainline has built its business model on being, you know, an exceptional place to get to decomplexify the ticket buying process and to get the cheapest price. And yet so very much focused on the start of the journey. But the rest of the journey always comes into play. And so Joe asked us to have a think about whether or not we could do something in that disruption space and report back.
- [12:58]
A
So Joe, what would you ask? What would you add to that? Joe, like how did you get to this issue of disruption? And disruption in this case is not a positive thing like we're going to disrupt the market. It's that the market's already broken in part.
- [13:14]
B
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I guess so. The insight is that effectively we do well when there is discontinuity. Okay. And what I mean by that is whether there is new players that come into market, which increases the complexity of choice, or there are More ticket types or, I don't know, something else happens where something shuts down or opens up. So we have done well with discontinuity, bringing clarity to confusion. And discontinuity is also in the disruption space. Right. So actually I had planned to go from A to B. It's now not happening because the driver's not turned up or like something's happened on the railway. I now need to find another way around it. So when you know, you. You bring sort of like calm to chaos on from discontinuity perspective from the booking side. You know, ultimately we've been the market leader in that space and we've led the way, but we've been followed as well.
- [14:06]
A
Right.
- [14:06]
B
And ultimately people have copied us along the way. So actually what it's aware that you can only go so far with that without the market changing and waiting for market changes, and we don't want to wait for that. Right. So it's like, where is the next best space to occupy to help customers with discontinuity? And that is disruptions. Things go wrong on the rails. So it was actually for me that the ask was, well, this is a territory we can fulfill from a customer experience and proposition perspective. It feels the right space and place for us because it's a play on discontinuity. But what is the role here? What do we do? What do we become? And ultimately how can this become a competitive advantage? And for me, this is where Nick and his team and I really firmly believe in the power of great strategy teams helping you with like mega business strategic questions and problems. And yeah, and this is where we came to Nick and team.
- [15:03]
A
So, Nick, I think one of the important things Joe mentioned there is the role that train lane can play because you can't fix the problem. Maybe you can just be a psychological crush or some. Or you can address some aspect of it emotionally maybe.
- [15:21]
C
Yeah, absolutely. So it's interesting. So Joe gave this problem to us and so we had a think about it and to her point, this is the kind of project that we love to get our teeth into because it's upstream and it's something that. Where we can actually properly start to change the direction of a business. And there are a few things that we discovered. Like the disruption space is in the airline industry. There are services which do a lot in this space. So like, I can find out if my, if my plane is delayed, I can find out pretty much where it is in the sky, how many people are on it, you know, how fast it's descending. All those kind of things where it's come from, all those kind of things in the rail space, you can't or you couldn't. And essentially we did a bit of digging into this space and we asked real people what they thought and felt, not about pricing or anything like that, but the kind of emotional space of disruption, and found out that there was a lot of extremely angry people out there. Again, I can't overstate how angry people are about this.
- [16:33]
A
Even without disruption.
- [16:34]
C
Even without disruption. It's just like. It's a very triggering space for people.
- [16:39]
B
There's a physical manifestation of this. If you go into Italy, in any train station, Italy, there are queues at the kind of customer service desk. So it's kind of like the customer problem is physically visible in some of these places. Sorry, Nick.
- [16:53]
C
Yeah. And you go online, go on Reddit for 5 seconds and type in Rail Rage. And you'll see a lot of this as proof. And it's interesting. There's this funny psychological thing that happens where in the UK and across Europe, up to a third of trains are disrupted at some level, and yet at
- [17:16]
A
any moment in time.
- [17:17]
C
Yeah, yeah, it's a lot, man. I don't want to do rail travel down.
- [17:24]
B
I spent a lot of time on trains. I mean, luckily I seem to be all right these days, but, yeah, when it can go wrong, it can go wrong big times.
- [17:31]
A
So. Lord.
- [17:33]
C
I mean, it's particularly acute in the UK, where kind of 25. Between 25 and 30% of trains are kind of disrupted in some way. And yet. But the psychological problem is even bigger. So a third of trains are kind of potentially disrupted, but two thirds of people are afraid that their trains are going to be disrupted.
- [17:51]
A
Interesting.
- [17:51]
C
Which is almost worse. So there's this kind of perception, reality gap, which we are dealing as well. And the fact that the first person they go to, or the first people they go to when something happens, like I said, is the ticket provider. So you are kind of screwed in a couple of different ways. You're like, number one, there's definitely disruption happening. It's perceived to be bigger than it actually is, which drives a lot of emotional things, let's put it that way. And then people will blame you for the results.
- [18:25]
A
And you, in this case, being Trainline, since that's where I. That's where I got my. So your. Your customer service line is probably. Whether it's. Whether it's a physical line or otherwise, you're. You're taking the brunt of it all. So you know this in Your customer satisfaction data, Joe, you see that?
- [18:41]
B
Yeah, we have, we have ton of this data and yeah, our teams are dealing with on a regular basis. Obviously we try and, you know, like in any, any business, you try and kind of find ways to help get customers self serve. But like that, this was the whole problem space. Like we, we could only get it to certain point and we had to innovate really with the team. So.
- [19:00]
A
So Nick, you, you see this, you see this challenge, you dimensionalize it. So what were you thinking about strategically in terms of what role the brand can play, the company can play in resolving that in a way where it doesn't seem like it's a cop out? Yeah, totally meaningful.
- [19:17]
C
Oh, totally. Yeah. So we kind of went. Maybe the size of the issue is actually the size of the opportunity. The place we went to in terms of the role of Trainline was to make the greatest bug in train travel the greatest feature of Trainline's acquisition and loyalty strategy, actually. So turning a huge perceived weakness into a strength for the brand. And the reason that Trainline can legitimately do that is that Trainline have all the data. And by that I mean, and Joe can speak to this more. But like Trainline has, knows where the trains are. They know if they're delayed, they know what's happening down the line, they know a whole load of things which are incredibly useful for combating this problem. Because through all this research that we did, we found that there are two things that the people, the passengers are really, really, really bug them. The things that induce rail rage. And the first is the lack of certainty. So people hate not knowing what's going on. I mean, everyone knows that if you've ever been on a train and you're stuck on it and you know that you thought you were going to have dinner with your wife and your kids, and now your nose is pressed into somebody else's armpit on a crowded train going into London and you have no idea what's going on. Like, humans hate that. So that's one thing.
- [20:51]
A
And by doing that you are in essence deflecting partial blame for it by just informing people of the reality of what it is. Even though it's not your fault, you're playing a role in diffusing it.
- [21:03]
C
That's right. The second thing is lack of agency. So there's lack of certainty on one hand, and the other thing is lack of agency. So everybody has need for control, but unless you give people the tools to fix a situation as well. So there's one thing about what's going on, but the other thing is either to fix the situation or rectify it after the fact. So those are the two things that are going on and those were the two things that we felt like we could lean into to give train line a role in the disruption space that would actually help.
- [21:40]
A
So Joe, you always had this data, I assume you're plugged into sensors along the train lines, you just didn't know what to do with it.
- [21:49]
B
We've always had industry data that tells us what's going on in the tracks and so you can always find great ways from a UX perspective to present that to customers. However, what we did also do is we built a piece of software or create a piece of software that predicts what's going to happen. So actually we've used basically ML data engineers to understand based on all of the patterns of what rail travel does in the uk. And it's an incredible piece of technology. And not only do we get the data from the industry, which basically really says, I don't know, I checked into this train station, I've not checked into this train station yet and I'm somewhere in between, but it doesn't tell you where that train is, how long it's going to be there for, et cetera. We can predict that. So based on many, many years of data and machine learning, so we've created the technology to predict what is going to happen and it's more accurate than the industry data, which is incredible. The other thing with that is like there are options, right? So there are options when something goes wrong, what do you do? What can you do? Or you can give them the information, a forecast of what's going to happen. So one of our features is travel forecast to say this is what's going to happen. Then you can help them reroute their journey, you can help them get compensation because there's a compensation system in the industry in the UK and also you can maybe even get them to swap their trains or for a later date if they haven't even boarded the train yet.
- [23:17]
A
So, Nick, let's talk about this sort of evolution from sort of train ticket company, train line defined as a train ticket company, to being more about train journey. I totally get it. It's like you've. It obviously points to a longer term strategy. That is now, now that we have this data, we're able to capture, we're able to predict now there's a myriad of ways we can roll that out. The first being refund policy and delay, repay. Right?
- [23:45]
C
Yeah. Exactly. So we did all this work around disruptions. We said, look, the greatest weakness can be turned into the greatest opportunity for your brand and your business, you know, and therefore we need to develop, to James point, a bunch of features which help passengers anticipate, illuminate and fix disruption, you know, when you're presented with that. But then, you know, when we called that package of things, strategically, we called it trainhero as a kind of like internal, sticky, internal name. And then developers went to work on it and, you know, and it was launched back in December and we can come on to talk a bit about that. But I guess the point about. So it was a project about disruption that turned into a bigger thing because the implications of turning the greatest weakness into the greatest strength was actually that we are no longer just a ticket company, we're a whole journey company. And we felt that we needed a bigger swing than just launching a set of features. And as a result, Trainline's platform for years had been great journeys start with Trainline. And I guess that point of view was that unfortunately great journeys don't finish with Trainline. And so we needed to rectify that. And we'd started working really, really closely, agency, marketing and product teams on this whole suite of, of disruption features. And that, as a kind of core driver of the business, felt like, you know, it felt like we needed to create a platform that did justice to where the business was going. So we kind of came to a place which was all about essentially customer centricity. You know, we do whatever it takes to keep every traveler on every train, on every journey on track was kind of the thought behind it. And based on this clear tension in the category, which is that people are really treated more like cargo than they are passengers in the world of trains. And you're like luggage more than anything else. And you're always forgotten about after you bought the ticket. It's like, whatever, we got your money, we don't care. And that felt like a really interesting competitive space for Trainline because, you know, so the conversation earlier about competition, it's becoming particularly the ticket buying space is becoming really crowded based Uber's in it. There are other, you know, value competitors out there. Therefore, for Trainline to carry on growing and to be a pro, you know, to continue growing in profitability, creating a bigger role for, and carving out a bigger role for business and brand felt important. So we got to this place which is all about power to the passengers and Trainline having a role, which is a bigger role about the definitive way to train, which is where that thought the way to train came from.
- [26:50]
A
Joe, what would you add to that?
- [26:52]
B
Yeah, I think there's also the aspect of. For me, the dream always is that you have a product and a marketing team who are just singing off the same hymn sheet and going, we believe in this big idea of what we are and our role is. And actually we're going to build. Build great products and services to do that. It doesn't always help happen in organizations. And you know, ultimately sometimes your product team's like, I want to make this. And the marketing team's going, well, I can't really. I've got to figure out how to sell it or. And so the beauty in this was at the beginning of the process where, you know, the Widens team came in. They helped us build an idea that teams could really believe in. And ultimately they said, well, I'm. I'm building a train hero, right? I'm building a train hero for passengers. I'm going to give them the power through these features, and at the end of it, they're going to feel like this. So it gave people real kind a sense of purpose, a sense of real accomplishment of what they were making and creating for consumers. So that was kind of one really key part. And then, so the other key part is actually we. A new chief product officer actually entered the building, which was fantastic. A lady called Nina. Nina, she came in and sort of like said, hey, we've done some great work here. I think we need to kind of be a little bit more solid from a product perspective around our, you know, our value proposition. Like, Joe, how. Like, how do you and the team think about the role of the brand? How do you think about the role of the product? And we basically collaborated across the product and marketing teams to say we actually believe we're now more for people or can be more for people. This set of features gives us permission to take on a bigger role, and it also allows teams to think bigger about what they can create for customers in terms of value. So the way to train was kind of like trainhero helped create the signal and the belief in creating something bigger. So that was a kind of, for me, a big win that actually people weren't just building features, they were building towards a big idea and a bigger role. And then ultimately, what. The same time it was, well, actually this role could continue. So actually what do we really want to be and stand for in the world? And so that was. It was a kind of organic pathway. I don't think we would have mapped out, we're going to do this and then we're going to do this. But actually, the great conversation between product marketing and widens was like, this is the way to do things going forward as well.
- [29:10]
A
So, Nick, what makes you think that this is the right strategic direction to go in terms of owning the whole experience? I mean, is there something that's sort of fueling your intuition and your analysis?
- [29:25]
C
Yeah, I think it's the right way to go because for a few reasons, but, like, first of all, it takes you away from heavily contested value space. So it's a commoditizing category. The value game is a volume game, but it's not a particularly profitable game in the end, like the way the market is changing. So that's one thing. And the second thing is, like, it feels like what platforms like Trainline desperately need. It isn't just a positioning, but a kind of promise that they need to live up to, you know, and that helps them push themselves and, you know, keep ahead of the pack. And I guess that. So there's a dynamism to, you know, like being. Calling yourself the definitive service in the market is great, but it's not just a snapshot in time. It's something you have to live up to and deliver against, which I think is kind of helpful for organizations, to be honest. So, like, we haven't, to Joe's point, right, like, we haven't just been thinking about this as a new set of features, We've been thinking about this as not just a set of features, but a new space to jump into. And not just that, but a new platform for the brand and business that will drive it forwards for the future, which really ultimately is, I guess, what we want for all the brands that we work with. And it's been great to work with somebody like Joe, who's been completely on board with that, has helped us navigate all of the many problems that come with the complexity of doing something like that.
- [30:58]
A
So, Joe, to that idea of this broader definition of the brand and the business is part of what you have to be careful of doing is raising your costs by adding features, by possibly adding services. And do you think of that as a way to increase margin or do you think that you have to do it without increasing costs?
- [31:23]
B
It's about retention, actually. So I think in like, to Nick's point, in a commoditized space, in terms of booking a rail ticket to retain, like, to keep just reacquiring customers is where the money gets spent effectively. And obviously we have A very strong brand moat, that kind of really helps. But ultimately you could largely you're spending cash where actually if you had a better, more extended proposition that was more attentive, as we are now seeing with this proposition and these features, it means that we don't need to invest so much in acquiring lots of new customers, but actually making sure that they're getting better services frequently. So I think, I think about it as more around. It's a retention mechanic that enables you to reinvest what you might have done in reacquiring them because it being a commodity to actually a better long term proposition.
- [32:15]
A
Interesting. So I gotta think, Nick, when I look at the airline industry, even worldwide, particularly here in the us I think that many people have broken in with new propositions, with new proposed experiences and they were better, but they could never survive it. They ended up having to change things. I mean we have Southwest Airlines here, we've had Virgin, like you guys do. They were phenomenal in the early days. But maintaining that distinction was challenging over time. For not only issues of marketing, not only issues of the street, but regulatory issues, et cetera are also a factor. There's so many different things at play. How do you make sure you stay ahead of that potential risk going forward? I mean, you've got to have a roadmap for the next three, five years.
- [33:11]
C
Totally. I guess I see it as almost the opposite problem. Trailing has gotten.
- [33:17]
A
I love when somebody from Wyden and Kennedy says I think of the opposite problem. I've got to tell you, this is what's brilliant about these guys. I've had conversations with so many people at Wyden and Kennedy and I think then they come back with that. I think of the opposite problem and I love it. I think I'm just wrong
- [33:34]
B
and I go, oh yeah, that's a good idea.
- [33:37]
A
Conversations with Tass in New York are with Dan Hill in London and that's exactly. There's a flip. That's why they're so great.
- [33:45]
C
Naturally contrarian, I guess. But the thing I was going to say is that like I think what's interesting about Trainline is it's got the benefit of 30 years of incumbency. I don't think the problem is it's like it's part of Trainline is the institution in the uk. I think its problem isn't that because all the fundamentals are there, it's profitable business, it's got a high consumer base, enormous awareness, it's a really well loved brand in the UK and increasingly across Europe. The problem for Trainline is actually the opposite. Trainline has always been a customer centric organization is why it, it came to into existence in the first place. There was a customer need to be met, there's another customer need to be met now that nobody else is meeting. And therefore this is the right play. This is in the DNA of Trainline. And you know, I would say that, you know, in a few years time there will be another thing and another thing. And that's the beauty of the organization. There's appetites for, you know, meeting those needs on an ongoing basis, which I think is different.
- [34:53]
A
So Nick, can you, can you. For those who are not watching this on YouTube but are actually listening, listening to it on the podcast platforms, I want to drop the spot in, but we're going to need to explain it briefly as to what's going on.
- [35:08]
C
What this spot is trying to do is get to the fundamental emotional, you know, doom loop that people feel when trains are delayed, when, you know, they can't get the ticket they want, when all of those things almost accumulate at once. And so what it is, this is the TV ad. There's lots of other activity around it, but it's set in the lobby of a British train station. And there's lots of kind of repeating behaviors that you see which are there to represent a lot of the, the emotional intensity of just the goddamn tedium of being stuck. That's right, when the train is delayed or isn't there or you don't know what the hell's going on. And so it's supposed to be whatever's
- [35:56]
A
happening in the ad.
- [35:57]
C
You can watch it, but it's like it's supposed to capture that emotional feeling that everybody can recognize.
- [36:04]
B
The train is delayed by 15 minutes.
- [36:06]
A
Done with disruptions,
- [36:10]
C
tired of confusion, want
- [36:14]
A
to find answers, not wait for ages lost in the chaos. No more.
- [36:24]
B
No, there's a new way to train now. You can plan around disruptions, rebook and get help with delay. Repay the way to train Trainline.
- [36:33]
A
Joe, in what other ways? I mean, I think Nick alluded to the fact that sort of was also expressed through different channels. How have you dialed it up through your different channels? And is there anything notable in the way the comm strategy has rolled it out beyond the film?
- [36:52]
B
I think I would probably say the audio side of things. So I think that's probably been the most expressive and fun. I've loved the audio personally. We actually, as part of, in the run up to the big launch, as it were, we did a bit of A seed campaign on delay. Repay with a very cool little catchy song called Tap that app. And I mean if you, if you can play that too, that would be amazing. I literally have it on my Spotify and my kids like pressing play because it's very catchy. But it's all about if your train's delayed, get repaid. Tap that app.
- [37:22]
A
I'm seeing that. Yeah, that's happening in now actually.
- [37:27]
D
It's been over 15 minutes and your train is not here. Don't leave your money on the tracks. There's something you should hear. Open train line. You don't have to be frustrated. Cause there's something you can do to get compensated. Tap batter on train line and your trains delay. Tap that app on train line. We help you get repaid. Tap better.
- [37:58]
C
It's a classic brain worm. We love it. It's extremely strange, but it's incredibly sticky.
- [38:04]
B
Yeah, 100%. And so, and largely like for us, like you know, coming down to real kind of marketing basics here but like, you know, we have a very clear understanding of what levers work for us. We kind of know like where, like to what extent this needs to show up from a reach and frequency perspective across the product, across channels, et cetera. So we're all, we're working to the maths here a little bit and ultimately putting the fun and creative content in the right spaces to get the engagement we want. And we're seeing some good results so far. Obviously it's just sort of like probably six or seven weeks in. We launched it in a period of the year where there is a lot of disruption. So at Christmas time. In the UK in particular, it's renowned for overbooked trains, people traveling to see their friends and family sitting on the floor or standing up or whatever. And we launched it at that time and then ultimately it's run since mid December across multiple channels. And we've seen uptake obviously in usage of the features. So whether that be checking their travel forecast, changing trains, doing more delay, repay, all of that. And that's largely, it's been largely coming from sort of like customers who perhaps need a bit more reassurance. And then equally we've seen uptakes in kind of awareness of these features, but really also a real positive increase in how much people think that our brand is for them and ultimately helping with them with delays and cancellations. So obviously from when we look at kind of long term metrics and we're assessing them on a regular basis, what we would expect to see is that People feel like the train line is offering them more of the journey, therefore it's a more attentive proposition.
- [39:45]
A
So, you know, one thing I wanted to touch on before we wrap here is, is time in market and spend. Not specifics on spend, but time in market. How do you know when you can go to the next step? I mean, disruption feels like it's a phase along a journey, no pun intended. How do you know when you need to reflight a media? How do you know when you need to reflight an investment or throw more investment about it behind it? How do you know when you've gotten to those interim goals?
- [40:20]
B
Yeah, so basically there are three main drivers from a feelings perspective that actually impact the overall revenue growth of our business, whether that be via new customers or retention. And one of those is. Helps me with delays and cancellations. Right. So we know it is a key driver linked to business metrics. And we basically, from stuff that we've done on the value side, which is where we've been for many, many years, we kind of go, right, this is based on where we've been and where we've taken it to and where our competitors are. This is the baseline we need to be targeting and we work back from that. Like how many. Like what is the reach and frequency we need to get to and how long, like across all channels, owned, earned and paid. How long and how might, how much might that cost? And what, what do we feel comfortable doing? And what signal we get, we get from that along the way. So we do a lot of incrementality testing just to understand the.
- [41:15]
C
What.
- [41:16]
B
What's the right playbook there? So whether that be out of home in stations, whether that be audio, whether that be paid, social, whatever it might be, and then ultimately we've got these kind of very clear goals that we know drive overall business outcomes. And we're just kind of trying to try and test the playbook to get the signals in the kind of most. The highest velocity in the shortest amount of time to get to. To get to where we want to and where we've got to on the value space, as it were.
- [41:41]
A
It is Joe McClintock, VP Brand and Marketing for Trainline in London, and Nick Doherty, Chief Strategy Officer for Wyden and Kennedy in Amsterdam. Thanks for coming on the show, guys. Great story. Love digging into it. Appreciate your time.
- [41:55]
B
Thanks Vegas. That was really fun.
- [41:57]
A
And we'll see everybody on the next episode.