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How some of the best social media marketing campaigns have come from automobile brands

[This article was originally written for Social Technology Quarterly]

For many of us, our car (or our bike) is more of a passion than a product. We spend months researching which car / bike we should buy. They are our prized possession, conversation starters and status symbol. We connect easily with other people owning the same car or model as us and whenever we get to meet such people, our conversations often go around this passion we share.

All these characteristics make automobiles a great product to be marketed with social media and hence it is not surprising to see that some of the best social media marketing campaigns have come out of the boardrooms of automobile companies. Not only that, each and every sizeable player in the automobile market is dirtying his hands in the social media marketing space.

So what is it that makes automobile marketers love social media and how are they using to space to come up with the finest of the campaigns. This article aims to tell you the reason behind their love, some examples of the best automobile marketing campaigns and what the social media marketing community can learn from automobile marketers.

Why social media marketing for automobile?

A car is more than just a car: Social media marketing works best when you are marketing a passion and not a product. A passion makes people bond and directs conversation. These conversations around passions are the heartbeat of social media marketing and a campaign run as long as these conversations run.

The best thing about marketing automobiles is that they are larger than the product. For many of us, they are a passion and as I said earlier, are talking points of our conversations. Hence, no other media suits selling an automobile better than social media for its abilities to connect people, connect with people and engage them.

Instrumental in research, recommendations and advocacy: What sells a car? The three most prominent factors that I can think are research, recommendations and loyalty. Since a car is a considerable investment, we spend a lot of time researching on the best models, understanding the specifications, comparing brands and their various models. Here we use a lot of recommendations from our friends, talk to the experts among them, search for reviews online or research into specifications to understand whether we need them or not. Sometimes, our loyalty for a particular brand makes us advocate specific models to others.

Interestingly, when it comes to cars traditional media helps you in none of the above factors affecting the sale. A 20 second ad spot, half page emailer or full page banner is just not enough to satisfy a consumer’s needs. Social media, however, is a great tool here. It generates conversations for recommendations, supports thought leadership for research and gives a platform to brand advocates to promote their favourite brands

Time bandwidth for engagement: Another thing about cars that makes social media an attractive tool for marketing is that cars are not purchased on impulse. Customers take their time in deciding which cars they need to buy. Inbound marketing techniques like social media marketing, might not be best at generating mass awareness quickly (like ads), but they are great when it comes to engaging consumers across every stage of the sales funnel.  And hence, considering the prolonged time period between that the consumers take in deciding their cars, social media marketers get enough time to engage the consumer in conversations, develop a relationship with him and convince him for their product.

How auto industry is using social media?

There are no fixed set of strategies for marketing anything through social media. How your market yourself depends upon what you are selling and whom you are selling to. So if you are selling cars and automobiles, you strategies will be built around the fact that you are selling a passion, a subject around which people talk a lot, around which people have lots of stories to share and people react badly if anything goes wrong with it.

Based on this you will see that brands are using 7 different strategies to sell automobiles:

Listen and respond: This is an old school way of using social media and is often the first step of a brands entry into social media marketing. But we cannot undermine that this very strategy has helped brands like Dell generate millions of revenue. Moreover when it comes to car, people are very verbose on social channel and love to talk about them. Hence you have all the auto majors like Chevrolet, Ford, Honda, GM on Twitter tweeting their way to respond to consumers, listen to their conversations and find opportunities.

The interesting thing here is that most of the automobile majors have their senior staff (and not external hired agencies) doing talking on these social platforms like Scott Monty for Ford and Adam Denison for GM

Toyota used the same strategy during the massive 2.3 million vehicle recall in January 2010 but with a difference. They got Digg to let people ask Toyota questions and others to ‘digg’ the most popular questions. Then Toyota got their President for North American sales operation, Jim Lentz to answer these questions in a video interview.

Conversations with customers: Once you know that your consumers are talking and researching about your cars online, it is a good idea to give them a place to get the best content for your brand. This is where blogs come really handy in having meaningful conversations with consumers.

Brands like Volkswagen and GM understand this fact and hence they have run a number of blogs to engage, inform and connect with their audience.  While VW has individual blogs for its different models like Jetta, Passat and Beetle; GM runs other popular blogs like fastlane, drivingtheheartland etc

Microcampaigns: These are small campaigns, often for a duration of a month or two, that aim at exciting the audience for the car and increasing recall in the consumer’s minds. From a technology point of view, such campaigns are often applications running on platforms like Facebook rather than run on an independent platform. Few examples of such campaigns have been listed below:

• In 2008, BMW launched an online graffiti contest, where participants could paint BMW cars with graffiti tools – a simple but effective campaign to engage audience around the brand
• Volkswagen Nederland launched another app called the Fanwagen, where it asked its audience to vote among the all time VW classics – the Beetle and the T1 – and they can win the vehicle as a reward. The classics were however armed with social media features like print your newsfeed, relationship status near the number plate and many more
• Harley Davidson launched the H-D Fan Machine contest where they asked fans to submit ideas for H-D web videos about how life is better on a Harley. You can see some interesting stories coming from fans
• In another campaign, 100 cars for good, Toyota decided to donate 100 cars to organizations that need them for doing good. Many non profits participated while others voted for the non profits they thought needed the cars most.
• Honda Civic launched a quest called the Honda Super Civic Quest, which took participants across various clues and challenges across different Honda channels to win a Honda Civic

 

User Generated WOM campaigns: This strategy truly uses the social potential behind marketing cars. If people love talking about cars, let’s get them some more reasons to do so! And hence you have major automobile makers creating campaigns that ask people to share stories and experience with their cars. Although the idea is simple, it is leading to tremendous word or mouth from people. People today might not believe the brand, but they will definitely buy such stories from other customers. Here are some examples of such social media campaigns:

• The Road we are on campaign by Chevrolet focussed on celebration of 100 years of Chevy and asked customers to share their wonderful memories with Chevrolet on the platform. Interestingly, they also have filmed a series of documentary style webisodes for Bridgeville and the role Chevy has played in the history and culture of the city. Another campaign by Toyota – The Camry Effect too has Camry users sharing their journeys and memories on the platforms
• Jeep launched the ‘Have fun out there’ campaign, where it asked it customer to share their moments of fun with jeep. They got some exciting submissions, like a fan converted his jeep a music machine, others shared their photos of coast camping with jeep
• Such user generated social campaigns might now always be about cars but also about a particular value carried by the car brand. For e.g. Volkswagen launched a brilliant campaign some time back called the fun theory where they asked people to post ideas about exciting and fun ways to change people’s behaviour. In the teaser campaign, they converted a subway staircase into a large piano with each step as musical keys, to encourage people to use stairs more than escalators.

Social Reality shows: Some of the biggest of the car brands have used social media to create mega campaigns on the likes of reality shows but executed socially. How social reality shows are different from user generated contests is that in UGC, the focus is the content generated by people, whereas social reality shows are less about the content and more about the excitement behind the task and the participating people. Here are a few exciting examples:

• Ford launched the Fiesta Movement campaign that is considered to be a benchmark among the social media campaigns. Ford in order to generate buzz about the launch of the new Fiesta model, gave it into the hands of 100 social agents, who drove it across US and completed various missions thereby promoting the vehicle on various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. The success of Fiesta Movement led Ford to launch a second chapter, where participating teams engaged with local talents to find creative ways to promote Fiesta
• Chevrolet too launched a reality contest on similar lines called the Chevrolet’s SXSW road trip challenge. However the reality contest was more crowdsourced in ways like the challenges and mission were decided by the crowd.
• In India, Mitsubishi launched a similar contest for Cedia in 2009, where they used social media to find the finalist and asked them to tour across India along various routes and share their experiences with the community.

Communities: Building a community of car lovers is definitely a great idea. Not only it creates an active pull-based marketing platform that your consumers visit often, it also helps you understand your fans and exposes you to large amounts of valuable data from conversations in the community. I have not seen many online community initiatives by auto mobile companies (although there are many independent fan communities), however there is a specific example by BMW mini called creative use of space – a community of artists and designers – that is worth talking about. This community engages people in projects and initiatives around making ‘creative use of space’ – and core value behind the BMW mini brand

Experience Apps: These apps are more sales focussed and aim at bringing the in-car experience to a potential customers. Although currently most of these apps are at a catalogue level ( see… ), there is a great potential of moving a level higher and adding social components to these apps ( like user generated reviews for various features, related blog links for more research, ability to share experience with your network of friends and followers etc

Automobile companies have very aggressively adopted new marketing models and made their marketing more social and engaging. They have succeeded in creating interesting social media marketing campaigns, and also have proved the ability to market successfully with this media. We would look forward to more fascinating campaigns from car makers in the near future.

Image credit: Moviewallpaper.net and Stuffkit.com