Archive: 2009

In a previous post for Headlightblog.com, I covered Citroën’s plans to build a supercar that was originally designed for Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo 5 Prologue videogame. Recently, Mercedes-Benz announced that its SLS AMG supercar will be featured in Gran Turismo 5 (GT5), an expansion on Prologue that is scheduled for release in March 2010. GT5 is also the first of the main numbered series to be developed for the Sony PlayStation 3.

Email offers the automotive industry a fantastic channel through which to build loyalty with consumers and add value to the car-ownership and brand experience. Further, with consumer spending dropping and marketers’ budgets being cut, it’s more important than ever to acknowledge the importance and effectiveness of the email channel and how it fits within the organization’s overall marketing efforts.

Even though overall Certified Pre-Owned sales are down this year, a number of automakers — including Hummer, Hyundai, Infiniti, Jaguar, Kia, Land Rover, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Subaru — experienced double-digit sales increases between Jan.-Sept. 2009 compared to the same time period last year.

Ever since the open source software movement started in 1998, businesses across all industries have learned the benefits of cooperative activity and collaboration. And with the recent growth of Web 2.0 technologies, cheaper creative tools and a cost-saving mentality forced by the recession, it is no surprise that there has also been a trend of leveraging the mass community -– crowdsourcing, as some call it -– to achieve business goals in innovative ways.

The Landscape
Back in September 2008 Lehman Brothers collapsed. The resulting shockwave had immediate and damaging consequences across the financial markets and, ultimately, the entire economy. An already struggling automotive industry was pushed to the breaking point.

While car dealers on Facebook and Twitter are nothing new, an increasing number of those retailers are using their status updates to list inventory. There is now software that can automatically update Twitter, Facebook and other social-networking websites to include a dealership’s entire inventory. Rather than treating the status update as a classified ad, the real value in joining these social networks may be in the opportunity to create relationships with both customers and colleagues alike.

The first realtime 3D vehicle configurator application for Microsoft Surface, which was developed by Frankfurt-based Neue Digitale / Razorfish, was showcased earlier this month at the annual Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung (IAA), the world’s leading automotive fair.

Savvy car buyers expect vehicle technology packages to include powerful audio, navigation and phone-connectivity options. They expect to be able to hook up their brought-in media players and phones with little hassle and they want future devices to connect just as easily for as long as they own the car.

The Chrysler and GM bankruptcies are wrapping up and “Cash for Clunkers” recently ended, so what happens next in the digital automotive space? Five answers.

Fluent, a new Razorfish report, examines the rise of Social Influence Marketing – the method of employing social media and social influencers to meet a company’s business and marketing objectives. The report features a new proprietary survey that explores how social media informs consumer purchase behavior, and introduces the SIM Score – a new benchmark Razorfish developed to measure a brand’s social influence and favorability relative to its competitors.