Tuesday 19 June 2012

Not so smart thinking

Along with my olympic tickets, the post has also delivered a marketing piece from BT.

BT is Britain's former sole telephone provider, British Telecom, now transformed into the largest supplier of phone and broadband services to businesses and consumers in the UK.

Part of BT's current marketing drive is to win customers over to its new fast broadband service, BT Infinity. 'Want to become one of the better connected' is how the spiel goes. It tells me, how from just £9 per month, I could be enjoying broadband speeds that are up to 8 times the national average. Impressive.

Except there is a problem. Nowhere in the two separate componants of the marketing piece does it give me any estimation of what my speed would be if I switched to BT, not even a range of potential speeds. Am I expected to go online and check what BT's interpretation of average national broadband sped and then do some calculations after that? I think perhaps I'll stay with my current provider.

What makes this more incredulous is that the Advertising Standards Authority has recently made much of ISPs use of attainable speeds and claims of 'fastest broadband' in their marketing collateral. BTs failsafe response seems to be to give the customer no firm information at all.

Monday 18 June 2012

Smart thinking

I am happy to report that I received my tickets to the Olympic Games in the post. The tickets themselves are well designed and will be an essential souvenir of the London 2012 experience.

The tickets were accompanied by one day travel cards, one per day per ticket. The travel cards allow unlimited travel across the entire London public transport system from the central zone 1 through to the distant leafy suburbs of zone 9.

This is a stroke of genius.

Immediately, the ticket holder has been presented with a very compelling reason to use the preferred method of transport to the games, allowing transport planners to model traffic flows for the games with greater accuracy.

By supplying Olympic ticket holders with travel cards in advance, queuing is minimized and the load on ticket machines and ticketing staff is greatly reduced during what is epected to be the busiest ever prolonged period of use for London's public transport.

This idea is a definite gold medal winner.