The LM project is an excellent example of the process at its best. In addition to the creative talents at BI, LM had a phenomenally good marketing manager who I'm sure will have pushed BI to get the absolute best from them.
When it works well it's a tremendous collaborative exercise, with each side challenging the other, testing every decision and assumption, and not being afraid to have a few arguments along the way. It's an exhilarating process.
Also, while people have talked a lot about liveries, timetables and posters etc, but you may be surprised just how deep BI's involvement goes.
For example, when I was launching Bluestar/Red Rocket back in 2004/05, he was a big part of discussions about how we numbered/lettered the routes themselves, and even influenced the actual timetables in a few cases where he could spot changes we could make that would make them more customer-friendly. That's quite a normal part of the process when the relationship is working well.
He's also passionate about the design of the vehicles themselves, not just what you put on them, and he spends a lot of his own time (unpaid) talking to manufacturers and encouraging them to find ways to make the design of their vehicles more customer friendly and more streamlined with smoother lines etc, to improve the image of the bus in the minds of the public.
When projects involve new or refurbished vehicles, he is a key part of the commissioning process. For example, when trentbarton was specifying the current fleet of Red Arrow coaches back in 2014/2015 - one of my favourite projects to date - he accompanied us on every visit to the factory, helped decide which type of seat we should order, and then got the seat manufacturer to modify the physical design of the seat because it wasn't quite what we wanted. He helped us decide which material we should use on the seats and floor and in what colours, designed the pattern of moquette (it's not actually moquette but you know what I mean), and influenced the positioning of TV/next stop display screens, bell pushes, handrails, decency screens etc etc. That's all perfectly normal - on one visit to ADL, Reading Buses were there at the same time - quite deliberately to save him two trips - and he was running from one group to the other, because he was doing exactly the same for a batch of E400s for them.
Of course manufacturers don't always give him an unqualified welcome - often to keep costs down, they just want to make as many as possible of the same thing with as few options as possible, so sometimes there's an element of compromise, but the more enlightened ones welcome his involvement. There are hundreds (or maybe thousands) of vehicles in service around the country that incorporate design features that users take for granted and won't even notice, but whose form or functionality is subtly better than it would otherwise have been, thanks to his involvement.
