(15 Feb 2014, 11:53 am)palatine3833 wrote Trent Barton are the company that have proven that branding does work! Look at their business model and you can see that their brands keep going from strength to strength. However, Go North East is a larger company and so it is harder for them to achieve the same level.
Trent Barton rely so heavily on their brands they don't even use service numbers on the vast majority of routes, but they seem to have a lot more spare vehicles readily available than Go North East. Personally, I think the biggest problem that GNE face with their branding is their maintenance, which leads to mass amounts of vehicles being off the road at one time.
There is an interesting link to an article I put in the branding section, about how Trent Barton operate from an employees perspective.
Having spent quite a lot of time working down there, the network is impressive, but is structured totally differently to anything we have up here - geography probably plays a part in it too.