How everyone except Government Motors sees the Chevy Volt

Imagine you’re Joel Ewanick, GM’s global marketing chief, and you’ve got a problem.

You have a subcompact car that, even with a $7,500 government subsidy, sells for the price of a luxury sedan.

It has severly limited range. According to your own company’s director of electric vehicles and batteries, it would take four weeks to drive this subcompact from Detroit to Florida. Which, he admits, is one whole week longer than it would’ve taken to make the trip by bike.

Its sales target for last year was less than 1% of your best selling model’s, but it missed even that unambitious goal by 24%.

Your dealerships from New York to California are refusing deliveries.

Oh, and the car’s best known for catching fire.

So what do you do? Read the rest of this entry »

Running out the clock?

Advertisers are going all-out with a startlingly innovative new game plan this year. They’re going long. With their commercials, that is.

Volkswagen will be airing a 60-second spot. So will their sister brand, Audi. Hyundai’s running a :60 just before the kickoff, on the assumption that that’s when they’ll have more of viewers’ undivided attention. (Of course, the fact that they’ll be paying only $200,000 to $4 million just before the game instead of around $6+ million during it may have had something to do with it.)

And a 45-second PepsiMax commercial is rumored to be in production.

Isolated phenomenon or trend?

Kantar Media, which tracks television ad buys, notes that November, 2011 — the most recent month for which they’ve compiled statistics — saw an increase in 60-second commercial buys and a corresponding decrease in :30s.

But Super Bowl ad plans and buys are made months before then. So what gives? Why are advertisers coughing up twice as much as the $3.5-million-per-30-seconds rate? To say nothing of hundreds of thousands more in production costs? Especially since, the mini-trend that Kantar’s statistics imply Read the rest of this entry »

At least somebody got it right.

Quick Response [QR] codes — those bar-code-like things you see on everything from rental cars to Bratz dolls, should be a marketer’s dream.

Since the early days of direct-order coupon ads in the early 20th Century, advertisers have known that the simpler the response mechanism, the higher the response — and what can be simpler than pointing your smart phone, scanning and clicking?

QR codes make every advertising medium instant direct-response — everything from the Times Dispatch to the packaging at Wal-Mart, Martin’s or Kroger to the billboards along I-64.

Enterprise Rent A Car pastes QR codes on the left front windows and attaches them to the keyrings of 1 million North American rental vehicles so that passers-by and drivers who are so inclined can get information from the  car’s manufacturer. JC Penney has gone hog-wild with QR codes, including holiday gift tags that let the recipient hear a recorded message from the giver. Some funeral homes even sell tombstones with QR codes that link to an obituary of the dearly departed.

QR codes connect target audiences with the instant gratification of a sales message, video, or e-commerce portal. This means that retailers can increase productivity by serving more customers with fewer salespeople.

Best of all, they’re precisely measurable, and if there’s one thing marketers love, it’s metrics. Read the rest of this entry »

Their commercials promised more than they could deliver.

You’ve seen it on Channel 6, Channel 8, Channel 12, Channel 35 and the Verizon and Comcast cable systems serving Richmond. Consumers saw it on their local TV channels across the country. It was a Best Buy television advertising campaign claiming that between the retail chain’s huge inventory, their online ordering and fast shipping, “Santa better watch his back this year.”

Well, this year, seeing wasn’t believing.

Aggressive online discounting against Amazon and Walmart Stores boosted website traffic, in-store sales and general demand — demand it turns out Best Buy couldn’t satisfy. The Minnesota retailer made news with a last-minute cancelation of orders dating as far back as the Black Friday weekend after Thanksgiving.

And when word of the cancelations leaked out — the company having disclosed them only to select media and never even mentioning them on Facebook and Twitter — they also made enemies. Read the rest of this entry »

2011 demonstrated both the strength and the weakness of social media marketing.

The strength is that anyone can do it.

The weakness is that anyone does, regardless of whether they know the least bit about marketing. And when they do, the results are often disastrous, as Advertising Age‘s just-released list of the year’s biggest social-media marketing blunders demonstrates:

Anthony Weiner: Maybe he shouldn’t be on this list. His tweets were not about marketing, but packaging.

Chrysler: The auto maker rolls out a new national campaign, “Imported from Detroit,” on the Super Bowl. Then some low-level jerk at New Media Strategies, Chrysler’s online agency, tweets — not on his personal acount, but on @ChryslerAutos — “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f***ing drive.” (We won’t spell out the f-word gerund here, but he did in his tweet.) Result: agency fires employee, Chrysler fires agency.

Kenneth Cole: Reacts to February’s Tahrir Square uprising by tweeting, “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is available online.” How do you say “putting your shoe in your mouth” in Arabic? Read the rest of this entry »

For the second year running, consumers have picked the worst television commercials. Well, they didn’t actually pick them themselves. They had lots of help and nudging from The Consumerist, Consumer Reports magazine’s blog.

Consumerist picked the categories, which narrowed down the choices considerably. Maybe they had to, in view of Sturgeon’s Law, which says that 90% of everything is crud. Arguably, 90% of all the year’s television commercials may be too much to narrow down, much less be subjected to. But Consumer Reports does have a different perspective from the everyday, run-of-the-mill consumers; ya think maybe a publication that refuses to take advertising somehow doesn’t like ads?

Okay, we’ve built up enough suspense.

And now, the losers!

Most Grating Performance by a Human: It takes a lot of obnoxiousness to beat out Progressive Insurance’s Read the rest of this entry »

Who needs it?

Bad news for all the car dealerships along West Broad Street and Midlothian Turnpike (and their counterparts across the U.S.A.): Your manufacturers’ ad departments are letting you down — to say nothing of boring the pants off your potential customers.

Formulas for a fantasy world

According to research just released by Ace Metrix, all those commercials featuring cars with oversize ribbon bows being given as gifts or end-of-year sales just aren’t working. In the consumer research company’s scale of zero to 950 points, Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the leaves have stopped turning color in Richmond, soda cans are starting to.

Out with the white, in with the red!

In Martin’s, Food Lion, Wal-Mart, Kroger and other supermarket chains, throughout the Richmond metro area and the nation, Coca-Cola cans are changing back from white to their traditional red. All because of a failed green promotion.

Green Promotion

It all started when Coca-Cola partnered with the World Wildlife Fund in what seemed like a good idea at the time: Coke would urge customers to contribute a dollar to the WWF’s save-the-polar-bears campaign and match donations to a $3 million maximum.

Perception vs. Reality

But reports of the polar bears’ impending doom may be slightly exaggerated.

According to a 2008 US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee report:

The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, up from as low as 5,000-10,000 in the 1950s and 1960s. A 2002 US Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear population “may now be at historic highs.”

And, photos of polar bears dying of exhaustion from swimming notwithstanding, a 2008 audit from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, the Monash Univeristy (Australia) department of Business and Economic Read the rest of this entry »

Like a loaded gun in the hands of a three-year-old

More and advertisers — from local Richmond ambulance-chasing personal-injury lawyers to worldwide brands– have succumbed to the dogma that all it takes to win big-time in the marketplace is a blog, a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. Back in March, we highlighted two national examples of how misguided this belief can be — the 2010 Pepsi social media campaign that rocketed their brand all the way from second in its category to third, and the Burgeer King social media campaign that produced a 2/5% sales decline while McDonald’s sales grew 4.4%.

Pepsi and BK were lucky. They just lost sales. A social media campaign made international headlines this week because it cost the advertiser not only sales, but also its reputation.

Watch what you say

The first reason for this and similar debacles was the advertisers didn’t realize that the audience they were reaching was, basically, everybody. “[W]ith every person on the planet who has an Internet connection now armed with the power to freely publish information one to many across sites on the web,” writes Emma Barnett in the (UK) Telegraph,“…companies have never been more held to ransom by the customers.”

QUANTAS airlines learned this the expensive way.

Coming off a bitter lockout and a string of safety failures that grounded their whole fleet and stranded passengers around the world, Read the rest of this entry »

Only a few shopping hours left till Christmas!

Enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner early this year. Or, better yet, turn it into a picnic as you camp out on line at Macy’s, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, HHGregg, Kohl’s, or the Richmond big-box retailer of your choice. Black Friday’s going to be a little early this year.

From Black Friday to Black Midnight

In case you didn’t know it from all the advertising activity — the spam, the coupon ads and direct mail, the JCPenney “plan your attack” previews, the return of Target’s obnoxious holiday shopping spokeswoman to television – retailers are trying to grab as many of your gift dollars as early as possible.

To that end, opening times, usually scheduled around sunrise, have now moved to zero-dark-hundred, with many being as early as midnight.

And you’re going to be seeing even more of the Target shopping lady because they’ve doubled Friday, making it two days long.

Apparently, it pays to advertise

According to the NPD group, consumers are responding. They project that 17% of consumers plan to start their Christmas shopping, up from 12% last year. Some 74 million say they’ll definitely be shopping, while another 77 million say they’ll wait to see if the bargains are good enough to justify battling the crowds. And crowds there will be. Read the rest of this entry »