Is this the future of cycling in London?
It looks like Barclays have upped their game as providers of a sustainable cycling society for our capital city. With the release of their Barclays Cycle Hire App they have really set out their stall.See: Barclays Bike
Can the audience catch-on?
Even their ATL material is reflecting a future thinking strategy. They obviously have the advantage of 1675 stores nationwide to form the most perfect billboard advertising. Aside from image consistency, (which Barclays do very well) the push for their Cycle Superhighway, a bold project, again underline their commitment to our sustainable ‘cycle’ city. Overall a great images, if a little photoshopped!
Raising a banks profile
As part of a multiple channel approach that is both two-fold; raising Barclays brand to become recognisable as omnipresent in our day-to-day life and providing a useful service far removed from ‘bad-boy’ financial services, Barclays have cleverly positioned themselves as THE environmentally aware corporate organisation that is there for it’s customers, both financially and as a environmental astute organisation.
How to market your App successfully
True and effective App Marketing (There are now over 300,000 apps available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch and surprisingly many of the best ones are free, more surprisingly only a fraction are kept for continual use) relies on three key points;
- Rigorous testing so when the end experiences your App for the first time the experience is nothing but positive. This testing should be used in your Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) as default.
- Cross channel promotion using regular traditional media (print, campaign, advertising ) with what we can term ‘new’ traditional marcoms (banner ads, email campaigns, site take-overs, app store promotion, mini website) and complementing those channels with more UGC or 3.0 Web promo techniques (QR codes, reviews, competitions, games and FB pages)
- Word of month. We all know the best form of marketing is recommendation, the previous two points all attempt to get you to recommend this product or that service, if your apps allows you to do this by virtual sharing (FB or Twitter) or actual sharing (“Hey, have you seen this?”) then you’ve succeeded.
Comments
2 responses to “Can Boris Bikes turn London in to a world-class cycling city?”
I vet you point but it’s a little confusing.
There is a definate argument for effectively marketing your app and I agree some clients miss that trick. Why else are there so many apps that maybe as interesting as Angry Birds but never hit the big time.
Just found out that if you try to take a bike out but get a red light, you have to wait 5 minutes until you can try again.I was surrsiped that the guy from Serco who tried to help me out didn’t know about this 5 minute rule.Better communication needed.When it works the cycle hire scheme is great. At the moment though, I don’t have enough trust in the software systems to be able to rely on it.