Archive for the ‘Automotive Marketing’ Category
There’s a relatively new retail automotive TV campaign making it’s viral way around the country. It’s a puppet badger acting as a sleezy car salesman. Granted, most of the spots are very funny. But why? Watch the clip below and then ask yourself why it makes you chuckle. Possibly because you’ve experienced it? Is that smart marketing?
I’ve never understood this strategy. According to sales reports, neither have most consumers. I think this is just one great example of incomplete thinking in the marketing process. Could a funny industry-degrading ad get attention? You bet. Could it win creative awards? Of course (that’s just a question of money). But does it really change the opinion of the consumer when the “alternative” solution is presented? RARELY.
EM634DFGQD2X
It’s only Tuesday and it’s already been an interesting week. Depending on what news you listen to or read, the economy might be in store for a “good-but-not-great-and-certainly-cash-not-credit” holiday shopping season. With Black Friday just around the corner, this TED talk by John Gerzema of Young and Rubicam seemed like a timely 16-minute video to show my staff today. So I thought I’d pass it along here. John has a great background in consumer behavior and advertising, along with being co-author of a terrific new book, The Brand Bubble.
Look at this picture. What does it say to you? To me, it says there’s a woman out there with enough confidence to laugh at herself. That’s humility, and I admire the heck out of her.
I’ve met many people lately who are unwilling to submit to their lack of social media knowledge. They have the “I don’t understand Twitter therefore it is a joke” mentality. How sad. They will be last in the unemployment line in a few years.
Oh, I’m no poster child for humility. I didn’t really get Twitter until about 9 months ago. I thought it was stupid. Now I’m busy playing catch-up. So I speak as an equally flawed human being, which is why I can attest to the fact that businesses must embrace the power of social media whether they really understand it or not.
My message of hope to you is that you are not alone – MOST PEOPLE DO NOT YET UNDERSTAND SOCIAL MEDIA. But you can no longer ignore its marketing power.
These days, with technology changing so quickly, most of us need to trust and rely on others who know more than we do about these new business tools. The sooner we find them, trust them, and let them help us, the sooner we’ll gladly have our picture taken in a Wonder Woman costume. I look forward to it.
Photo by Jordan Small
I had the most fascinating meeting yesterday. It was with four men in the auto industry. One of them, an existing client, is more savvy than the other three. The other three were what I would have considered typical dinosaurs in the business. I know this because I had met with the same three men a year earlier. At the time I shared our agency’s belief that traditional advertising was becoming more and more ineffective, and that the poor quality of creative messages being delivered by most of the auto industry were only making things worse.
I made suggestions to move them toward more trust-based communications with car buyers, and noted that putting a little respect back into the selling process wouldn’t be a bad idea either. But my message fell on deaf ears. It was obvious to them that I didn’t know what I was talking about. They said this economic crisis was just causing a temporary hiccup in the automotive world. Things would get better, as they always did.
That was a year ago.
Fast forward 12 months, one humongous recession, a national Cash for Clunkers campaign, and a few million less car sales. I was invited back to “re-address” the situation. This time they listened, better yet, embraced what they heard. With God as my witness, I said the exact same things I had before. The only difference was a little more focus on TRUST. I referred to Chris Brogan and Julien Smith‘s book, Trust Agents, and walked them through how changes in media, marketing and creative will only succeed in today’s world if they have this foundation of truth, transparency and trust. They ate it up.
What’s the takeaway here? Some dinosaurs can evolve without becoming extinct. Make TRUST the goal of every marketing program and you might speed up the evolution process.
I added it up. I now spend an average of 32 hours a week online, mostly after hours (thus the bloodshot eyes) and mostly in my own self-made school of learning from the social media gurus who kindly share so much great information at no cost. I eat it up. And yet, with almost every blog post I devour or podcast I listen to, I am constantly intimidated by all that I don’t know. Compared to Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, Mitch Joel, and CC Chapman (just to name a few) I am in social media pre-school.
But that’s OK. Because I still share their greatest power – and so do you. It’s the understanding that truthfulness, transparency and sincerity work. That’s really it. They know it, they preach it, and they’re creating some of the greatest business success stories in history with it.
How we ever went so far away from truth in marketing and advertising, I’ll never know. But with 28 years in the business I have to admit I’ve probably donated to the dark side. In fact, I can clearly recall conversations with clients over the years where transparency was considered too risky and, besides, did we really need to be sincere when we had (insert celebrity name here) doing our next commercial?
No more.
Thanks to too much media, too much razzle-dazzle, and too much abuse of consumer trust, those days are long gone. We’ve come full circle back to a wonderful place that is the nucleus of social media’s marketing power.
So next time you feel overwhelmed by all you’re hearing, reading and seeing about social media, don’t fall into the insecurity trap of “I don’t know code so I’ll never understand Social Media”. Go to your gut. Think of a world that does business by sharing the truth. Use that as your foundation for learning. Everything else will fall into place.
Most of you reading this know Brandtailers expertise includes extensive automotive marketing. That being said, I humbly defer to our level of industry knowledge when I say, “Wow, the fed sure knows how to screw up a rebate program…even ones they create!”
If you’re not up to speed on the latest federal government fiasco because you’d rather read the obituaries than the automotive trades (actually there hasn’t been much difference between them this year), here’s the short version of what’s happened so far with the “Cash for Clunkers” program.
After eight months in Congress, Cash for Clunkers gets approved. Obama signs it. Three weeks later (last week) it launches. It gives $3,500 or $4,500 rebates to consumers trading in eligible clunkers for eligible fuel efficient vehicles (Don’t get me started on where the money is coming from because I don’t want to use that kind of language).
The auto industry finally has something strong to offer. Within 72 hours car sales are going crazy. Dealers are gladly taking clunkers in return for federally subsidized rebates. The plan is designed so that the dealer can cover the rebate amount for the consumer and, after submitting the necessary paperwork, get reimbursed by the government. Uh, oh.
The fed sets up one website for the dealers to submit their reimbursement paperwork – about fourteen pages per sale that has to be uploaded, one at a time. You can guess what happens next. The system overloads, the site slows to a crawl, dealers get timed out, the site crashes time and time again. It ends up taking hours per sale, that is, if the dealer is lucky enough to get through the process at all. In less than four days a program designed to last four months is in chaos.
The NHTSA (National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration) is in charge of the program’s administration. They panic appropriately and, after estimating that less than 10% of actual sales have been processed, they send out an emergency alert halting the program. Their assumption is that the one-billion dollars in federal funding is already gone. Meanwhile an estimated 225,000 vehicles have been sold, with millions, and millions, and millions of dollars fronted by the dealers who assume they will be getting the money back. I’m amazed we didn’t hear about the highest number of heart attacks in under one hour when that alert went out.
So where does it sit now? Well, the House generously passed a quick $2 Billion financial increase to the program last Friday. Then they left on vacation for five weeks. They told dealers, “We’ll cover anything you SUBMIT through Tuesday, August 4th at midnight. But after that we make no promises until the Senate approves the increase.” Meanwhile dealers are left trying to explain this debacle to customers, while they hold their breath to see if they’ll actually get back all the money they fronted on the customers behalf. If the program fails to deliver its promise to the dealers, there will be an all new level of bloodbath in the automotive industry. For once in many peoples lives, it’s time to feel sorry for the car dealer.
The moral of the story? It’s the one we already knew – government and cars don’t mix.
