Getting brand positioning right is a challenge for any business and even more so for those trying to appeal to multiple audiences.

Bus operator First Bus has been on a journey to make bus travel “desirable and attractive”, shifting its focus towards people, rather than product alone, and targeting two very different age demographics.

“One of the things we’re trying to get right is that balance between not being too targeted and too niche, but also not being too broad, because the bus means different things for different people,” explains First Bus head of marketing Jordan Kemp.

The UK bus industry has faced no shortage of challenges in recent years. Passenger numbers have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, while operators contend with the costly transition to electric vehicles and mounting pressure to address the climate crisis.

At the same time, long-held perceptions of bus travel as slow, unreliable and low-value persist.

“How do you achieve modal shift? How do you get someone to give up their car and use the bus?” asks Kemp.

“You can’t do it in a single campaign. It’s not something that can be promotion-led. It’s about the full marketing mix – price, product, place and promotion – working together.”

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That challenge led to the launch of First Bus’s new brand platform in December last year, part of a wider modernisation project that touches every part of the business

“There’s been so much development in technology and how traditional customer touchpoints have changed,” Kemp explains. “We felt we needed to modernise.”

The result was ‘Moving the Everyday’, a brand platform designed to encourage people to switch from cars to buses while highlighting the role of public transport in connecting people, reducing congestion, improving air quality and supporting the UK’s journey to net zero.

The initiative marks a shift away from thinking about buses purely as a functional product and toward positioning them as a service with social, environmental and emotional value.

“Trains and planes can be infrequent, because of the distances and costs involved, but buses are every day and for everybody,” says Kemp. “The heart of the transformation wasn’t about changing a logo or a colour palette. It was about how we interact with customers every day and how we make sure we turn up in the best form, every day.”

That’s the key thing for us: being able to deliver a consistent product and then promote it in a meaningful way to achieve a broader shift in behaviour.

Jordan Kemp, First Bus

Central to this was understanding who the brand most needed to speak to. First Bus identified two groups whose bus use had declined – under-22s and over-65s – but who rely heavily on public transport for different reasons.

“So while we’re a product for everyone, we need to make sure we’re relevant,” Kemp explains. “We recognised there are certain audiences within our markets we need to talk to in ways that resonate with them.”

In the spring, First Bus launched ‘Life Starts at Bus Pass’, a national campaign aimed at people aged 60 and above. Kemp says the language around older passengers has been due for an update.

“The terminology has always been ‘senior bus pass’ or ‘old person’s bus pass’. But the stereotypical view of a 65-year-old with a blue rinse and a shopping trolley is completely outdated,” he says. “Many people in that age group are still working, volunteering and certainly don’t see themselves as old. We wanted to reflect that in a way that resonates with them and make it celebratory.”

More recently, the focus has turned to young people. Working with creative agency MadeBrave and research firm Savanta, First Bus found that price was not the biggest barrier for under-23s. Instead, it was uncertainty about where buses went and when. The research also showed younger people were more likely to use the bus for social occasions rather than commuting.

“Traditionally, in the bus industry, there’s a massive cliff edge when people get to 18-19, they go off and get a car,” he explains.

From that insight came LFG, short for ‘Let’s Freaking Go’, a campaign that taps into the slang and energy of a younger audience. It aims to encourage a new generation to rediscover the bus as a cheap, sociable and sustainable way to get around.

Because the brand is targeting two very different audiences, the media strategy has had to adapt.

“There’s this assumption that young people only absorb digital content, so there’s a big trend for having a digital-first strategy,” Kemp says.

“But our research showed that out-of-home still has huge resonance with this audience. Bus is a big out-of-home media provider. We just don’t do it well for our own products. With young people, we said, we need to make sure we’ve got that right media mix. But then also not ignore some of that legacy stuff.”

For students, that has meant advertising along university routes; for older passengers, more traditional placements such as linear TV proved effective, Kemp claims. Meanwhile, he describes one of the biggest challenges for the bus industry as simply “catching up”.

“When you boil it down, we’re similar to retail,” he says. “We’re selling seats to people. That’s one of the things that’s always been a challenge in public transport: how we can learn from broader industries. In terms of having a brand platform, key audience groups and then maintaining a consistent brand narrative.”

From six teams to one

The changes go deeper than campaigns. Until recently, First Bus operated six separate regional marketing teams, one for Yorkshire, another for Scotland, and so on, each working with its own agencies. That made for a fragmented approach.

“We realised we were talking to the same audiences, just in different regions,” says Kemp. “Now we’ve got a single national team, and as part of that, we’ve reviewed our media approach and strategy. We need to speak to people where they are and put our product in front of them where they are.”

That shift has allowed First Bus to consolidate its agency roster and creative direction. MadeBrave, which previously worked with the Scottish arm of the business, now handles national brand campaigns.

“There was just no consistency before,” Kemp admits. “Now, when we deliver these brand-led, audience-specific campaigns, they’re driven by a single message. That’s been a big change for us – delivering a consistent message nationally and getting more bang for our buck.”

Kemp is clear that advertising alone cannot change travel behaviour.

“If we want modal shift and we want to get more adults to give up their car, then the bus has got to compete with the car,” he explains.

That means clean, comfortable vehicles with air conditioning, reliable service, and clear information. Historically, the industry has struggled with this.

“The reason why there has not been a lot of proactiveness from transport, and especially bus, is because there’s always been this thought that we can never deliver a consistent product that would make it attractive, so why spend on sophisticated marketing when we can’t guarantee the bus will turn up on time?” he says. “But technology is helping change that.”

The growing role of apps and digital feedback loops means marketing now has greater influence over product decisions. However, aligning marketing with engineering and operations brings its own tensions.

“Marketing might say the seats should look a certain way, or that we need mood lighting to create atmosphere, and engineers will say, ‘That’s too expensive to maintain,’” Kemp explains. “All of a sudden, you have this clash over it needing to be delivered every day, and also having a ‘wow’ factor. ”

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Kemp believes bus operators have a shared responsibility to promote bus travel as an attractive and sustainable alternative to the car. “We want to play our part in that – to make sure that bus is desirable and attractive.”

For First Bus, that means focusing not only on communications but on delivery. “When someone suggests to a friend, ‘Let’s get the bus’, we don’t want the reaction to be a grimace,” Kemp says. “It shouldn’t be: ‘It’s going to be dirty, it might not turn up, I’m not sure where we’ll get dropped off.’ It should be something people feel good about choosing.”

“That’s the key thing for us: being able to deliver a consistent product and then promote it in a meaningful way to achieve a broader shift in behaviour.”