Author Archive

Need to Buy

Friday, November 14th, 2008

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.

Push vs Pull

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

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

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

To Do listLists 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?

Auto Free For All

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

After a one week lay off, it’s BACK!

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

Auto Free For All

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

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

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.

Auto Free For All

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

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.

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.

R.I.P. Hood Ornaments

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

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.

Every Bit Brilliant

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
Below is an ad from Australia for the 2008 Toyota Camry.
Every Bit Brilliant

You can check out the TV ads here.

Pretty creative stuff from the land down under.

From TheAdFeed.

Online Leads

Monday, August 25th, 2008

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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Discounting your Brand

Friday, August 15th, 2008

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.