Omni Automotive Advertising Blog

The Big 3 needs a bailout. The COO for Best Buy has declared that this is “the most diifficult (economic) climate” he’s ever seen.

Both Automotive and electronic retailers have lost their “want” buyers.  In these times, consumers are cutting back, only buying what they need*. So unless it’s broke, no one is buying.

However, the Automotive industry does have a built in advantage. Leases. When a lease is over, people need to get a new car.

What are you doing to keep the customers that have already leased from you? Remember it is easier to keep a customer than it is to get a new customer.

Here’s how you keep customers. Don’t nickle and dime them on service and parts. Then, when the lease is up, give the customer a real value for keeping his or her business with you.

* It can be argued that no one really needs a car or a TV to live. But in the majority of consumers’ minds these are items that they need.

In the old days, advertising relied on the push method of motivating consumers. Basically, you buy enough media and you can push your product on the consumer. This was especially easy since television, the biggest medium,  only carried 3 channels.

Creatively, you could get away with a bland ad as long as it had a catchy tagline. A tagline that the consumer would remember after the second viewing and would be cemented into their minds after the 75th.

But thanks to the Long Tail, advertising does not have the luxury of pushing products onto the masses. There are simply too many products and too many mediums to saturate the market with your message. You cannot push your product onto people. Toyota is finding out about this fact of life.

Advertising needs to pull instead of push the consumer. Pull advertising engages and entertains the consumer rather than lectures at the consumer. Pull advertising is sticky, it’s viral and it’s all those other Web 2.0 buzzwords you hear.

But here are the big differences. Push advertising puts the product before the consumer. Pull puts the consumer before the product. Push goes to the consumer. Pull lets the consumer, with a little help and smart positioning, come to the ad. Push targets everyone the same way. Pull targets different people in different ways. Push is about frequency. Pull is about creativity. Push is what the client wants to say. Pull is what the consumers want to hear.

A message that the consumer wants to hear is far more effective than a message the client wants the consumer to hear.

Lists are important. They remind us of the stuff we too often forget. Lists help us remember to buy eggs at the grocery store or to pick up the dry cleaning on Thursday.

Unfortunately in this multitasking do it yesterday world, we need lists to aid our memory. Our brains are not wired to remember so much information. Lists are boring, yet essential in our every day lives.

Yet, marketers are now using lists as a marketing tactic. Instead of focusing in on a specific quality of a product or service that can make an emotional appeal to a consumer, marketers would rather rattle off a list of features in the hopes that one feature will strike a consumer to purchase. Throw enough spaghetti against the wall and some of it is sure to stick.

The thought is thus: Why choose one feature on this product when we can advertise eight? Surely more is better.

It’s not. More does not connect. More is not memorable. More equals more noise and less focus.

Is this the strategy you want for your product or service?

Imagine if your advertising was a quarterback? which QB would you rather have? The QB who throws the ball down field in the general vicinity of a wide receiver or the QB who uses pinpoint accuracy to find his receiver.

Sure by zeroing in on a specific target, a QB will throw an interception and a marketer will make a mistake and pick the wrong attribute to motivate consumers. But fear should not guide your decision.

In these tough times, more and more marketers are opting for fear instead of innovation. By basing your decisions on fear, everything becomes bland, boring and unremarkable. Fear makes you choose the easy and safe decision.

Right now, nothing is easier than a list. Lists are the tools of an unsure and indecisive marketer. Is that really what you want? Is that what your client wants?

After a one week lay off, it’s BACK!

• So what is the Credit Crisis doing to dealers… you probably already know. CNN is finally covering the story.
• Chevy is cleaning up nicely for their new Hybrid Silverado…
• And catering to the college crowd with Taxi Cab Confessions.
• Lexus… Faster than a speeding cheetah hologram.
• The new Fit fights gas mosquitoes. Another new Fit commercial.
• Volvo has just made an interactive movie type game to tie in with its boat race, or something like that. Just click the link. You only have four minutes.
• Speaking of movies, here’s a Film Noir about Mercedes-Benz and obsession. “The car is not following you. You are following the car.”
• Audi gets all emotional on us.
• Pontiac is all about details in this Sin City type spot. By Sin City I mean the movie, not the city.

That’s it for this week. Hopefully we’ll see each other again next week.

This is a post of all the automotive marketing news of the past week.

• Suzuki is doing whatever it takes to get you into a new car (other than of course, making a car I actually want to get into). See their new spots here and here.
• What’s the buzz around Mini. Fly funerals. Yeah, it’s as weird as it sounds.
• Speaking of Mini, here’s a horror spot that revolves around shopping carts. Not as weird as the above link, but equally as cool.
• More Mini. Here’s a Mini rocket.
• Childbirth is on the rise because couples want to get into the new Volkswagen Routan.
• Here’s a cool Volkswagen ad with a dog.
• Grip is important. At least Audi thinks so.
• Woman love shoes. That’s the basis behind this Chevy Traverse ad.
• The Lincoln MKS has liftoff. Yet another indie band shilling for a car.
• Ford sees a flat 2009 in Auto Sales in the United States. Investor says Ford best placed among the Big 3 to come out on top.
• And last but not least… Toyota’s ads sure have come a long way from the 1980’s.

That’s it for this week’s free for all. If you have any tips or ads you think would be a great addition to the free for all, please email at alopez@omni-advertising.com.

A lot of things happen in the week. Somethings are so important that we can have an entire post about them. Other things are only sort of important, and we can only muster a few lines about them. This is a post about those other things.

• Ford has just unleashed a car that will get 65 miles per gallon. Unfortunately it won’t be sold in the United States.
• Chevy and the EPA do not agree about the estimated miles per gallon for the new Volt. Chevy wants somewhere near 100 mpg and the EPA is saying it’s closer to 48.
• How did the chicken cross the road. With a shovel.
• Mirror makes Mini bigger and my face distorted.
• Saab wants to help you figure out your turbo gene.
• Toyota’s used as King Kong’s earplugs. They deliver big sound, get it.
• Blimey, the Honda Jazz has come to England.
• And speaking of England… here’s an old ad from an English Car Dealer. That’s one great deal! An above ground pool with the purchase of a used car. What’s that? You can’t tell I’m trying to be sarcastic.

Well, that’s it for this week’s version of Auto Free For All. Hopefully this will be a weekly feature. But I’m busy, so you never know.

Iconic, stylish and now unfashionable hood ornaments seem to be going the way of tailfins and the fastback: away. A recent Newsweek article says that Jaguar has gotten rid of it’s cat hood ornament as a standard feature. For an extra $250 you can add the cat back to your Jag.

Mercedes-Benz now has its three point hood ornament on less than one third of its vehicles. Cadillac, Dodge and Mercury have already buried this old relic.

You can check out the TV ads here.

Pretty creative stuff from the land down under.

From TheAdFeed.

J.D. Power and Associates recently released it annual ranking of online vehicle buying services. For the second year in a row AutoTrader.com ranks highest in dealer satisfaction for online new vehicle leads. Cars.com took the top spot for used car leads. When AutoTrader.com and Cars.com were not in first, they came in second. See the rankings below.

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Paul Williams over at Marketing Profs Daily fix just wrote a fantastic article detailing how Discounting Prices erodes your brand. Definitely worth the read.

But if you don’t have time to read the article, here’s a quick summary.

Basically, Williams argues that offering deep discounts and huge markdowns changes the customer perception of the value of your product. If you slash the price on new car from $17,000 to $14,000, the customer views the vehicle as $14,000 car. Even after the price goes back up, the customer will still view the car as a $14,000 car, not a $17,000 car.

Williams say the best way to woo customers without endangering your brand is to offer more value with your product, like lifetime tires, oil changes, etc. This will attract customers without hurting your brand.