Gautrain: Where's the marketing research?

For starters, it is highly unlikely that the project team has spent much time and effort on market research. And the reason this is so glaringly obvious is that no-one seems to have taken into account what the knock on effect to commuters will be simply by increasing the cost allocation from R7 billion to R20 billion.

Whichever way one looks at marketing, when the cost of producing a product or providing a service increases by almost 300% it is inevitable that the end price will increase as well.

With the Gauteng government insisting that Gautrain will not need any form of subsidy, it stands to reason that to recoup R20 billion in capital or just simply make the project viable, will now cost a lot more per traveller than it did a month ago.

Fundamental research

So far no-one has given any idea of what the price of a ticket will be which suggests that they couldn't have done any proper market research. Because the fundamental research question should have been to determine whether the consumer or would-be commuter would see value in a range of specific ticket prices.

I'm not convinced anyone has asked any of those 200 000 people who have been identified as potentially making use of the Gautrain every day, whether they would find it affordable.

Then of course, there is the assumption by the project team that Gautrain will take at least 20% of motorists off the Pretoria Jo'burg highway. First of all the basic arithmetic doesn't make sense. Traffic on that highway is rising by 7% a year which means that after just three years the whole horrible congested situation will be back where it was with Gautrain now not solving any traffic problems.

But once again, where market research seems to be lacking, is on the question of the number of motorists who will give up commuting between the two cities by car and use the train instead.

Has the question been asked about how many of those commuters actually use their cars for business during the day? Surely that's the cruncher question? And if these basic market research questions have been asked why on earth have the answers not been published?

A communications disaster

Clearly, marketing is not a word that crops up much when the project team get together. Certainly, from a communications point of view there seems to have been no professional marketing influence because internal and external communication so far has been a huge disaster.

And from another marketing perspective, the Portfolio Committee is spot on when it insists that the Gautrain project must be delinked from 2010.

I would guess that anyone involved with marketing and specifically the communications aspects of 2010 will readily want to shy away from Gautrain right now because its potential to be an embarrassment and to upset the 2010 applecart is growing by leaps and bounds every day.

One thing is for sure. If the Gautrain project team has been ignoring the marketing fundamentals and has been making arithmetic assumptions instead of using market research, it will be a disaster.