Category: Marketing

As the U.S. economic environment continues to improve and consumers emerge out of the recent period of uncertainty, there are multiple underlying trends automotive companies are facing and should continue to address.

This post was excerpted from the Razorfish Outlook Report, Vol. 10. It has been modified in part to make it more relevant for the Headlightblog.com audience.

On Sept. 7, 2010, Bentley unveiled the newly redesigned 2011 Continental GT model on its website. Apart from a teaser clip, the first redesign of the legendary sedan could only be viewed during a one week-long web unveiling (accessible from here). The actual car will be shown during the 2010 Paris Motor Show next month.

Toyota is in the midst of the most widely discussed automaker recall in recent memory, and this seemingly Greek tragedy is still unfolding. The Toyota recalls of the past six months, two related to acceleration (floormat entrapment and sticky pedals) and one to braking on the 2010 Prius, have been the most publicly known and popularly debated automaker recalls since perhaps 2000, when Firestone tires were linked to more than 100 deaths.

Automotive consumers have been asking for change for a long time. Changes that improve how they shop, how they buy and, most importantly, their overall experience and satisfaction. Instead of selling through their customer base year after year, smart dealerships have been listening to their guests.

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.

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.

Facebook is growing at warp speed. Not only are the company’s user statistics staggering — 250-plus million users, 10 million videos and one billion photos are uploaded per month — but the service itself is evolving so rapidly that brand marketers can’t keep up.

I still remember the day when I first laid my hands on the NES – Nintendo’s 8-bit video game console and the best-selling gaming console of its time – back in 1985, playing now-classics, such as Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros. And I remember logging hours upon hours on my Sony PlayStation playing automotive games like Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo, immersing myself with everything car-related far before I was even legally allowed to drive. Fast forward to the day I was shopping for my first car; you can bet that I had flashbacks of the car models I “owned” in Gran Turismo.

Automotive marketing sits at a crossroads. As if macroeconomic conditions weren’t enough of a challenge, key media channels like TV are being subjected to radical transformation, including viewer fragmentation, ad avoidance behavior and fundamental shifts in the business models of all sides of the ecosystem. Auto marketers have historically been quick to embrace new advertising opportunities and, true to form, many have begun experimenting with our topic today: dynamic and personalized video.

Web marketing used to focus on driving traffic to one landing page or destination, but the fragmented digital landscape and growth of portable content have created ways for brands to take their sites — or pieces of it — to the traffic. Consumers can handpick content and have it delivered in a variety of ways, including RSS feeds, Facebook and iPhone applications and widgets.

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. And in these tough economic times, 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. It’s also a good time for marketers to take a step back and refocus on their email program and the value this high-return channel brings to the organization and its customers. Many marketers today, across numerous industries, are still guilty of running simplistic email programs that do not capitalize on the strengths of the channel, leading to consumer irrelevance and loss of interest.

It’s no secret that automotive marketers will be slashing budgets over the next year. Social media programs, often classified as experimental, may likely end up on the chopping block, but perhaps wrongly so. In 2009, marketers mustn’t drop social media all together in a recession; instead they should refine what social media means to their organization by adopting the following three strategies:

For the recently released FEED: The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report, we conducted an online panel survey of more than 1,000 tech-aware consumers to understand how they used the social, mobile and increasingly dispersed Web. The research showed us that social technologies had caught on big time, across more varied users and uses than imagined.

Your brand is made up of millions of little experiences.