Category: Advertising

This post was extracted from an article that appeared in the 2010 Outlook Report, which was recently released by Razorfish. It has been modified in part to make it more relevent for the Headlightblog.com audience.

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.

Detroit, we have a problem. Falling marketing budgets and deteriorating purchase volume in the global market put incredible pressure on the automotive CMO. Even without the financial crisis and the beginning of a recession, global share gains for search and interactive media were likely. Faced with significant uncertainty, marketing strategy shouldn’t be limited to optimizing the media mix.

Marketing Hummers has become a tad difficult recently. The price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate nearly doubled between the summers of 2007 and 2008 and automotive media budgets decreased more than 11 percent between the first halves of 2007 and 2008, marking 12 consecutive quarters of declining ad spending in this category.