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THE COMMERCIAL MANAGER

24th May 1968, Page 72
24th May 1968
Page 72
Page 73
Page 72, 24th May 1968 — THE COMMERCIAL MANAGER
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

"IT IS a sobering but challenging experience to be asked to present a paper to this Association at a time when so many major changes are taking place and so many people from outside the industry are attempting to solve our problems." So said Mr. E. W. A. Butcher, traffic manager, Ribble Motor Services Ltd., introducing on Thursday a paper on the problems facing the road passenger transport industry—much more stimulating than its title—"The commercial manager?"—suggested.

Mr. Butcher dealt at length with six subjects—marketing; transportation and urban planning; research; training; computers; and organization. Referring to his choice of title, he said that so far as the question mark was concerned, this should be interpreted as "why not" rather than "surely not", but, of course, the important word was "commercial".

On marketing, and marketing research, Mr. Butcher said that the industry might say that it knew its customers—what possible justification could there be to employ outsiders to carry out its marketing research? His own view was that remarkably little was known about customers, past, present and future.

For example, the extended tour operators —what did they really know about their market? Were they right to market these tours under their own company names and to concentrate on progressive tours rather than centred tours?

To take another example—did operators really try to find out their customers' views on seats, heating, ventilating and colour schemes? How often was it the operators' own preferences rather than those of the customers which determined what was provided? Mr. Butcher suggested that the industry should make use of at least one aspect of market research—product evaluation. If operators found out, or better still engaged other people to find out for them, exactly what their customers thought of the services offered, particularly stage carriage services, he was sure this would bring home the need for market research in its widest sense.

Calling for a national marketing plan, Mr. Butcher said that well under one per cent of the industry's gross turnover was spent on national and local advertising. This compared with nine per cent by inclusive holiday operators and holiday camps and about four per cent by airlines. The question would really seem to be not could they afford a national marketing plan but could they afford to be without it?

National advertising was in no way a substitute for local advertising—the two must be complementary, the main function of national advertising being to attract the interest of customers and prepare them for local advertising. The job of the latter was therefore to sell specific services to carefully selected groups of customers.

Mr. Butcher asked: "How many of us do, in fact, sit down every 12 months and agree an overall marketing plan, incorporating our objectives and setting out how our budget is to be allocated as between advertising, personal selling and, to a lesser extent, merchandising?"

Discussing sales operations, Mr. Butcher said that he meant personal selling by salesmen and all this involved. What scope was there for this aspect of marketing in the industry? Becoming really sales conscious, left no alternative but to use the word sales as often as possible.

For this reason Ribble had set up a sales organization, headed by a sales and publicity officer, with travel sales representatives, travel clerks, and so on. This had not meant engaging a lot of additional staff but it had meant retraining a number of people and making adjustments to the company's organization. All the talk about sales and future targets had undoubtedly helped to boost morale at a time when it would be very easy for staff to worry about short-term prospects.

On the subject of transportation and urban planning, the speaker said that he hoped to show that it made good sense commercially not only to learn to live with expert advice, but to become more expert themselves so that they could more effectively influence these other experts. Unless they could do this, he was certain that the solutions would suffer.

Criticism could be levelled at the present training of traffic engineers, municipal engineers and surveyors, many of whom received little, if any, formal training in transportation and the administrators would also leave themselves open to criticism if they insisted on expressing opinions on the purely technical aspects of transportation.

So far as urban planning was concerned at present, transportation was a large un defined area in which many experts had staked a claim. These experts had a strong civil engineering bias and Mr. Butcher felt that this was not necessarily the right training for solving the wider problems of transportation, or deciding the right balance between private and public transport.

Turning to research, the speaker called for the establishment of a road passenger re search association representative of the whole industry, which would only carry out a limited amount of research itself. Its main purpose would be to initiate research of a general or special nature and co-ordinate research throughout the industry on behalf of its members. Such an association would presumably be controlled by an executive council and need only a small permanent staff, consisting of a research director, one or two research assistants and three or four administrative staff. A considerable amount of money was bound to be spent on research anyway, but to what effect if an association was not formed?

Training and education Mr. Butcher then outlined some of the research projects which had already been carried out, referring to Wallasey, Ribble in the Carlisle area, Manchester and finally STAMINA. This latter was not the animal food but a linear programming technique developed by ICT and designed to minimize peak-time vehicle requirements. It had been successfully applied by a number of operators. While quite a lot of preliminary work had to be done before this programme could be used, it had the very big advantage that it was not an expensive technique.

The speaker dealt at length with the subject of training and said that the advent of the Training Boards had highlighted training and spotlighted the cost of training. He regretted the establishment of one Board to cover the road haulage industry, the road passenger transport industry and the private transport industry (garages). As one who had been interested in training throughout industry for the past 10 years and supported the idea of Training Boards, he could only hope that from both the training and commercial points of view it was not long before a system of differential levies and grants was agreed by the Board.

In the education field, the review being carried out by the Institute of Transport would be welcomed by the many people, like himself, who felt that the present list of examination subjects needed bringing up to date. It would be interesting to see what alterations were eventually made but it was to be hoped that subjects such as marketing and urban planning would at least be allowed as alternative subjects.

It was difficult for any one bus undertaking to organize its own courses for supervisors and managers due to the comparatively small number of men employed in this capacity. Mr. Butcher considered there was a real need for industry-based residential courses of up to two weeks for supervisors and junior managers. One would hope that the Training Board would be able to organize courses of this sort quite quickly but failing this he would consider it worth while undertakings co-operating in order to provide this training.

Turning to computers the following areas would seem to offer worth while computer applications: Research; costing and budgetary control; extended tours and private hire; assessment of passenger trends; and the analysis of passenger surveys. Mr. Butcher said that he had deliberately omitted duty schedules and vehicle allocation from this list because he considered a lot more work would have to be done before the computer could relieve the schedules department of any work. While he would agree that it was unlikely that a programme would be written which would be able to deal with the whole scheduling process from timetable to duty roster, he would not be surprised if quite soon computers were being used to check certain aspects of scheduling.

Forward planning was impossible unless fairly accurate estimates could be made of future revenue. This, in turn, meant analysing passenger trends. Because of the many factors which influenced the number of passen gers carried on stage carriage and express services this could be very difficult indeed.

The only effective way of assessing these trends would appear to be by analysing a large sample of specific journeys over a fairly long period. This sort of analysis should be well within the capacity of the medium-range computers being purchased by the industry at the present time.

Finally, on the subject of organization, Mr. Butcher said that, commercially, it was vital that management decisions should be made quickly. This required a small executive, not a committee of specialists. Such an organization gave flexibility of action and room for original ideas. But decisions must be based on facts, not personal preferences or "hunches".

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People: W. A. Butcher
Locations: Manchester

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