Act now Barclays, or the Boris Bike is here to stay

The Barclays Cycle Hire scheme in London is now four weeks old, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to the conversations of my fellow hobby cyclists, or observers on the street. No, instead, we say a happy four week birthday to “Boris Bikes.”

The attempt to brand the scheme Barclays Cycle Hire was always doomed to fail. It pursued only the most basic approach to sponsorship – slap a logo on anything that moves, slap a logo on anything that doesn’t move, and insert the name of of the sponsoring company on anything to do with the subject of the sponsorship.

This approach is failing for many reasons. Read the rest of this entry »