Marketing Intelligence by Iain Johnston

London is famous for many things. The city is a cosmopolitan mix of people and is world famous for the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, the River Thames, and red London buses. And black taxi cabs.

While I understand the merits and environmental efficiency of public transport, I must declare a prejudice: I get too hot on the Underground in the summer. So I spend a fair amount of time travelling between our various London offices sat in the back of black cabs. Quite rightly, our wonderful London cabbies are world renowned for their knowledge, their conversation, their love of cyclists and their shy and retiring nature.

These cabs are on the outside in the same form as they were 40 years ago, but under the surface, the technology has changed dramatically. In addition to the intercom which allows the driver to listen in to your innermost thoughts and conversations better than ever, and the mirror in an impossible position over your left shoulder, some also have this so called “in taxi entertainment system”. The barely visible screen down by the floor relays a loud and endless reel of adverts interspersed with some poker tournament footage taken from late night channel 456. The controls are on the side console (under the impractical mirror) and make my sky remote control look simple. Clearly they are designed to confuse (colours and symbols) sufficiently so that people can’t turn off the sound, thereby risking missing out on the important messages being delivered by the system.

Full marks for the idea of sprucing up the journey and attempting to grab some commercial gain from otherwise dead time. Zero points for actually delivering something that the customer really wants and values.

So, my wife and I were on holiday in New York last week.

New York is of course famous for lots of things, including the ubiquitous yellow cab. Locals will of course tell you that a point of differentiation between yellow cabs and the London black cab, is that New York cabbies are universally from Iran or the Phillipines, are always on their cellphone, have very little local knowledge, and will never stop for you if it’s raining or you are late.

But the thing that really impressed me last week was that every single yellow cab I entered had an interactive touch screen display that made our feeble London attempt at in-cab entertainment look pathetic.

EVERY cab had a system that:

1.                  is easy to use, intuitive interface, touch screen, and specifically easy to mute

2.                  has moving gps-based map display of the local area (updated constantly) so you can see where you are, and if you so wish the route to your destination.

3.                 allows  zoom in/out, places of interest.

4.                  provides a side channel (configurable) with a choice of entertainment, local tourist information and weather.

5.         ok, there were ads too.

It was almost as if the designer had actually researched with taxi users what they would appreciate, and come up with something that met their needs.

Although it seemed last week like we walked the whole city, we did catch quite a few cab rides. But far from resenting the mini-screen ads on our various trips, they were delivered as part of an interesting package. I guess this has been the challenge of media channel owners for ever.

It think this is a theme I will return to……