Take It Face To Face

I recently took the trip from DC to NYC for the amazing Social Ad Summit. While I love visiting NY I pretty much loath all forms of getting there. The plane is expensive and takes too long, driving is a nightmare, and the train is just not convent. I settled on taking the bus to NY this time.

Anyone who lives in DC, Philly, or NY knows about the Chinatown buses. They are cheap, dirty, and not all that safe. Seeing an emerging market for travelers many new bus lines have started up to create a market. One of the newer ones is the Bolt Bus.

The Bolt Bus offers a couple of neat value ad services that make it an attractive choice for travelers heading to NY; free wi-fi, clean bathrooms, online only registration are just a couple of the perks for this orange wonder. While riding back to DC a friend of mine, who I was traveling with, noted that there was no way he would ever take a Greyhound to NY but would take the Bolt Bus every time.

On our trip back we stopped at a rest stop in Maryland, where I snapped this picture, to stretch our legs. If you take a closer look at the photo you will notice something strange. Under the “U” in Bolt Bus the panel says that that the Bolt Bus is actually operated by Greyhound Lines.

Talk about great rebranding. Here is a service that is almost completely separate from the original business model. Sure they are both bus services, but the package is completely different. Greyhounds are cheap ways to get around, Bolt Bus is a value added way to travel.

Anyone can go to a bus station and get a Greyhound ticket to anywhere. Bolt Bus offers limited service and the only way to purchase a ticket is via the internet. The target demographics are vastly different and in turn the users of the service are vastly different.

I applaud Greyhound for creating a new ‘line’ and providing a new twist on a very old service model. Have you experienced the Bolt Bus? Do you have any other great rebranding exercises by a company? Let me know.

While I am never one to say image is everything… It is important. An image frames what your customers think of you and more importantly it frames what you think of yourself.

A little known fact about me was I served in the United States Navy (beat Army). While in the Navy I learned the value of ‘looking the part’. You wore a uniform that said what you would do. That is not to say if you were in a particular uniform you wouldn’t do what was asked of you, but you know what you were going to do by what you were wearing.

Marketing and PR is no different, if a firm wants to create a certain feel in the company culture it should take a look at the face it puts forward to clients. We at FaceTime have been going through a bit of re-branding trying to figure out what we wanted to present as our face.

We are planning to launch our new website with all of our new collateral in the near future but I wanted to put out a blog post to gauge what people thought. Not only do we have a new company logo but our site will be changing soon. But I wanted to start with the blog.

Any company’s blog is a great place to launch a rebranding campaign. It is a direct link to the people you are trying to reach and it allows for them to comment back on the changes you have made. I am hoping to gauge a bit of what the public thinks about our new look before we launch the official site.

Have any of you out there launched a rebranding campaign and started with a blog? What do you think of our new look compared to our older (scarier) one? Let me know.