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Recent content by Howard70

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    Branding and marketing blunders or failures on the railway.

    I never understood why 'Apex' tickets were named that. They were presumably at the bottom price-wise while being the least flexible. In my mind it represents the very opposite of the apex of the ticketing structure.
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    Avanti West Coast rebrand

    There's nothing particularly wrong with this in my eyes, but if you asked me to imagine a train to celebrate pride, I'd probably imagine something with the dial turned up a little further. But I suppose being too prescriptive about how to be inclusive and support people's differences would kind...
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    Avanti West Coast rebrand

    Naming reveal
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    First Trenitalia (Avanti!) WCML branding, naming and livery

    My initial response was no, it's not. There's still a contingent of old school BR types scattered about who refuse point blank not to wear suit trousers. However, everything's relative I guess so compared to other TOCs yes, the gist of your description is pretty much bang on ;) I should point...
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    First Trenitalia (Avanti!) WCML branding, naming and livery

    a chap named Sam. I won't give his surname as fear half this forum may hunt him down!
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    First Trenitalia (Avanti!) WCML branding, naming and livery

    This really hits the nail on the head in many ways when talking about brands and branding. While the casual observer may see the brand as simply a word or graphic and a colour scheme, the reality is that it goes deeper, or at least it should if it's being done well. It would encompass values...
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    Free WiFi in Standard - Virgin West Coast

    Probably because a load of passengers in standard have just started sharing all the bandwidth on the backhaul
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    Virgin Trains ticket website - "we just want to tailor your journey"

    This is pretty much spot on. You'd be surprised how much weight is put on feeding back through to improve customer experience.
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    Virgin weekend first

    that's incorrect, Trainline are a supplier to Virgin but Virgin Trains is the retailer if the ticket was bought on virgintrains.com
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    Rail Privatisation - not the cause of passenger growth

    Around 4 years ago I had my own pet theory on this question and it has little to do with the rail industry itself. Privatisation coincided quite neatly with the internet becoming part of our daily life, prior to which the act of catching a train would likely involve visiting a station to either...
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    Big data and data anyalitics - does the rail industry make use of this?

    funnily enough I know somebody working on this right now
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    Train Driving vs Bus Driving

    as a layman I would have thought the VR (or in the past DVD etc) approach would be a given as a starting point for route training? I understand that a train is different to a bus, but in a slightly different analogy it's not unheard of for an F1 driver to go straight into a race weekend at an...
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    Language Mangling

    Ironic though that professional copywriters in TOCs and Ad Agencies across the land are the people least likely to have created the announcements being discussed in this thread.
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    Virgin BEAM app

    Hull Trains and Eurostar did similar but not quite the same, I believe Hull was limited to ITV content with ads to support and as far as I know E* are still in the process of rolling out beyond their new trains. In terms of simplicity, you're right in that you could probably do it quickly...
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    Do Virgin actually read letters and e mails from passengers

    sending complaints on an industrial scale invariably means they have to be dealt with in the same way, hence I guess why OP wan't invited in for a chat about his ideas on meal plans

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