Branding
Are these ALL Brand restraints? Are some e g busdev resource, positioning vis a vis frameworks, procurement culture and lack of projection of our wider vision? Latter because it is soon and marketing is just building and takes time.
Morphing issues
Cost of building
Securing
Deciding
Just gaining traction e g SOCITM Report
Potential confusion
Very slow moving market - existing branding only two years old
Alternative brands
TrafficEvents.com
ELGIN :roadWORKS / eventsWORKS / trafficWORKS
SmartTraffic/SmartEvents
Smartstreets
CONs
also Trademarked
.com may be buyable at unknown price
co.uk taken by environment company
PROs
name suits the Smart Cities international agenda
Good suffixing capability - Smart XYZ
Who is it needed for?
1. Selling our vision to senior folk in LAs/PTEs/city transport initiatives/TSB gravy trainers like Catapult who see us in the streetworks niche
2. Selling our TDF story as a packaged solution to organisers of other large events, domestic / international for whom roadworks are barely relevant.
3. Selling to the Highways Agency, Traffic Scotland, Traffic Wales, where the ELGIN brand is recognised but who are not much interested in roadworks and for whom a proposal with “roadworks.org” written all over it is too easy to dismiss
4. Selling into international markets where the roadworks piece is a small slice of what we’re selling. (For example, as soon as we have a new brand I would like to re-engage with DBI Services.)
Manifesto for new brand
TM App is pretty unique, (but won’t be for long when others copy it). It captures authoritative, detailed traffic management information in such a way that it can be used operationally (benefit to numpty working for public body buying it), repurposed for travel information portals like the one we built for TDF (benefit to higher level order of mammal in public body buying it) and for sat nav (real benefit to society, benefit to visionary CEO buying it) – this last to be proven but there are no technical barriers that I know of.
It does planned and it does real-time. It captures traffic management for roadworks, public events and live incidents. In the UK context it has the potential to span the local authorities (our heartland), the HA (and Scottish/Welsh equivalents), city and regional transport bodies (Metro, TfGM, TfL), and the police – i.e. all the people who have the power to alter traffic movements. It can be used in Gold Command incident / event planning scenarios (as it was last week in Leeds) right through to day-to-day live traffic management, as per Hertfordshire. It can be packaged up and dropped into any new territory with barely a change to the code.
The data can be fed into turn-by-turn navigation systems, and gives us the potential for a secondary substantial revenue stream, though if that proves too difficult to pull off the sat nav play will help us sell the solution to core upstream clients. I am discussing this with Nokia/Here week after next. I have discussed it with our new Google account manager for TDF who shares my vision for how we could work with Google and is putting me in touch with the people who run Waze, who he says are the guys we really need to get to in Google. But he had one major caveat: “James, you have to be operating internationally for Google to bother with you. You have to demonstrate your solution can work in other territories.” So we need the international dimension as well. The 3 elements are complimentary: build out our UK position from the LAs up; sell into overseas markets; engage Google and the sat navs.
So, where are we at?
3 years ago roadworks.org was the perfect brand for what we did because what we did was roadworks. It has been a great brand to build a dominant position in the LA streetworks space and was just trendy and disruptive enough to mark us out from the Symologys of this world. “.org” worked for us as we segued from pretending to be government project to being the dot com of the streetworks space. I am not proposing that we get rid of it. It is still a great brand in local authority and utility land. But it limits our potential in other markets including:
· Selling our vision to senior folk in LAs/PTEs/city transport initiatives/TSB gravy trainers like Catapult who see us in the streetworks niche
· Selling our TDF story as a packaged solution to organisers of other large events, domestic / international for whom roadworks are barely relevant.
· Selling to the Highways Agency, Traffic Scotland, Traffic Wales, where the ELGIN brand is recognised but who are not much interested in roadworks and for whom a proposal with “roadworks.org” written all over it is too easy to dismiss
· Selling into international markets where the roadworks piece is a small slice of what we’re selling. (For example, as soon as we have a new brand I would like to re-engage with DBI Services.)
For these reasons I believe we need to evolve our product brand or create a new one alongside. I propose:
· We retain roadworks.org in our current LA and Utility engagements, where it is a good fit and has good recognition.
· We create a new URL brand to promote our traffic management vision into those markets where roadworks.org doesn’t cut it. We do this without confusing our existing clients.
· Behind the new brand sits essentially a subset of the same products, but packaged differently: i.e. the new look roadworks.org + TM App (the “TDF package” if you like).
· In time, if it is very successful, this brand might supersede ELGIN as our company brand, thus solving our naff URL (elgin.org.uk) problem. But that is optional and for the future if it suits our purposes at that time (e.g. exit positioning).
What should our new brand be?
· Our brand image must be smart, succinct, internationally vernacular, and descriptive of what we do: intelligent information about roads.
Existing brands
Apps - does this work?
CM and TM substantial overlaps as part of same communications platform
suggests cheap, iPhone & undersells value of platform capability
roadworks.org = platform brand
not vanillla - identifies us as roadworks
growing brand outside core base
Google no 1 for term roadworks
ELGIN = Company brand
WEAKNESSES
Known principally in England & Waler transport/LA sectors
Names of USA and Scottish city/town
STRENGTHS
vanilla
professional & government recognition
core base know us as this
no 1 in Google
Is it entirely a brand issue?
Aren t some of the barriers to international and higher up the decision chain for TM App/TDF the following....?
Weak procurement and framework positioning
Integrators and contacts prepared to take us in
Bus dev resource to make connections at top
