“My name is Ram and my tank is full.”
Have you ever seen an ad campaign this bad in your life? This is the kind of ad that was likely written by a bunch of people who have never, ever even been in a truck; people who must think Texas is a foreign country. It’s that bad!!
And by the way, the new ad efforts for Chrysler and Jeep aren’t a whole lot better. If this is what we can expect from the new Chrysler, then sell your stock immediately. Oh, I forgot, they don’t have stock anymore. They went bankrupt and you and I, the American taxpayer, bailed them out.
Saying an ad campaign is the worst ever is a risky call. That means the Dodge campaign has to have defeated some of the biggest losers of all time. Ones like the Nissan campaign that promoted Mr. K (or was he Dr. K) and a car they had stopped making years before. That wasn’t too smart. Or the classic Infiniti launch where some smart ad agency decided that they shouldn’t offend customers by actually showing the car. So instead, let’s show leaves and streams and hope that customers accidentally discover that our cars look good. Well, the customer apparently didn’t. And 20+ years later Lexus still creams Infiniti in sales.
But the Chrysler ads may even be worse than you think. My opinion? They're making the “It’s Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile” mistake. Don’t change the product. Change the ads. Oldsmobile told me it was no longer my father’s car, but they didn’t bother to change the car. So customers would go into showrooms and say, “Gosh, it sure looks like my father’s Oldsmobile.” And we all know what happened to Oldsmobile.
It’s a pretty fundamental rule of marketing that the customer is actually rather smart. And when they see a sexy ad for a not-so-sexy car, they get it. Or a truck ad written by people who have never driven a truck.
Want to see a great ad campaign? How about Howie Long’s TV spots for Chevrolet? Watch those and you’ll think about switching from Honda or Toyota to Chevrolet. They clearly understand their #1 marketing challenge. They’ve built cars that are competitive and look good (note to Chrysler - you might try that!!). And the ads stake out a clear difference and benefit for the customer.
The Fiat takeover of Chrysler was supposed to bring some new thinking to a stodgy company. But if this is what’s going to happen, my Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep dealer friends are in even bigger trouble than I thought.
“My name is RAM. And my tank is full” What crap!!
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment