Showing posts with label Camaro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Camaro. Show all posts
Automotive Vehicle Facebook Fan Page Strategies
If you are a regular reader of this blog you probably know I have been doing a monthly report on Automotive Facebook Fans that covers how the automotive industry is performing in fan counts and how brands manage to develop their fan base, usually through ad buys or Facebook applications.
What I have also been doing this whole time is tracking how some vehicles are performing in the Facebook community. What I’ve noticed is there are a few strategies companies have implemented to interest their customers or aspirational fans.
Here are some approaches:
Sports Cars: Most brands create a fan page around their halo or sports car product. For example, there is a fan page for the Chevy Camaro and Chevy Corvette but no official fan page for the Chevy Malibu or Cobalt. It is important to note there are often unofficial fan pages like this one for the Malibu. (Official pages are those managed by the brand. Unofficial pages are managed by someone not from the company.)
Campaign Driven: Most of the official vehicle fan pages were started at the time a marketing campaign was launched. This was true for the Ford Fusion and the Honda CrossTour.
Every Vehicle Gets a Fan Page: Acura and Volkswagen both apply this approach that no matter how few people want to socially identify themselves as a fan of Routan or ZDX, the brand has decided to invest time to curate a fan page for every product in its portfolio.
Product Segments: Ford Trucks is one example of this where fan pages are not divided into F-150, F-250, Ranger or other truck products; instead, fans of a Ford Truck can become fans of the entire truck product line.
Similar to what we see with brand Facebook pages, vehicle pages also get big spikes in fans from “Become a Fan” marketing campaigns on the site. For example, we see a huge lift of Chevy Camaro fans between Jan 1 to March 1, 2010 when the Camaro team was running ad units to increase its fan base.An interesting example of fan growth explosion came when the Honda CrossTour was launched and the vehicle’s wall was attacked by Honda fans who were not happy with the CrossTour design and some nastiness ensued. This, plus a “Become a Fan” marketing buy from Honda to promote the CrossTour, led to a 6,000 plus fan page growth in back in August/September 2009.
What’s most difficult for vehicle pages is the ability to continue growing fans after a marketing campaign. Sure a vehicle fan page won’t see double or triple growth percentages without some marketing, but even maintaining the typical 3-6% organic growth rate we see on Brand Fan pages is difficult for vehicle pages, unless the car is a sports car.
Why is this so? My theory is that people fan the brand more than a car. Take for instance the Lexus IS-C. When it was launched the fans grew to 300+ through some advertising buys, but in the past six months they’ve only added 11 fans (349 in 9/14/2009 to 360 3/31/2010.) Yet Lexus has added 22,000 fans in that same time frame without any ad buys within Facebook; though, Lexus does promote it’s Facebook fan page in email communications.
In summary, if your brand is more defined by only a few key vehicles where people have a lot of passion for a particular product then vehicle fan pages make a lot of sense; however, if your brand is more defined by the brand image (e.g. Lexus) then creating vehicle product pages for every car probably isn’t worth the effort and added community management complexity.
Chevy Debuts New Site with Some Unthought-Out Clutter
Is the Chevy brand trying to appeal to the Entourage crowd? Maybe it’s the high fashion couch from Target or the slightly loosened preppy boy tie or the arms expanded across the couch that makes me wonder what was someone thinking when they created the new Experience Chevrolet section on the Chevrolet.com website redesign that debuted yesterday.
It’s kind of funny the main image on the Experience Chevrolet site section (see above image), because the content just doesn’t fit what the image conveys. Instead what you get is a list of Chevy’s promotions with Major League Baseball, Fishing sponsorship, motor sports, and, of course, a few Country music stars thrown in. The partnerships and promotions are very apple pie America and true to the good ole’ boy brand of Chevrolet.
The page also showcases wallpaper downloads, events, social media page links, and awards. The Chevy Fueling Change content shows what Chevrolet is doing to further fuel-efficient products. But it seems all of this is a hodgepodge of content that can’t find a proper home. It’s like that closet in your house where a vacuum cleaner, old purses, light bulbs, stacks of old VHS tapes, and an old camera sit as some holding place without a proper home. Of course, Chevy is promoting a couple new products. The new Camaro certainly attracts a style conscience muscle car fan with its retro-cool good looks. The new Chevy Volt appeals to a green consumer who really doesn’t fit well into the hardcore American muscle appeal Chevy personifies, but it’s game changers like the Volt that create some new direction for the Chevy brand.
Chevy has always been a mass appeal brand with products like the Cobalt, Malibu and Silverado. Plus they have an iconic halo product in the Corvette. It’s interesting though, now that Chevy is entrenching itself as the broad appeal brand for GM as they keep Buick as a premium brand, Cadillac as their luxury brand, and GMC as a utility brand.
The brand section of the new Chevrolet.com just lacks a strong cohesive message and seems all over the place. This is part of the problem big brands have when synthesizing their brand into a strong distinct message, because the products are appealing to all sorts of segments. Maybe some better categorization of the content would help strengthen the different appeals the Chevy brand supports.
I just find it odd leading the brand experience section with a young 20-something guy all alone on a modern couch in the highway. Seems to me the Chevy brand is stronger than that, and has an appeal that is much more compelling. Maybe the aspirational target is a younger, single consumer who thinks of himself as trendy? If so, it doesn’t feel authentic. I’m not saying the image had to be a family in the country with an organic farm in the background. The page just needs an image showcasing the board appeal of the brand and less the just out of college Enterprise Rent-A-Car employee.
Chevy Camaro Launch Site Fails on Many Levels
Chevy launched the new Camaro web site today. Unfortunately, the cost cutting at GM is crippling assets as the team had to recycle videos from the upcoming Transformers film so they would have more than one video in their gallery. The one original video for the launch also suffers from some poor computer graphics (CG) development. Too bad, because the Camaros are showing up on the roads here in Michigan and the car looks amazing.
There is also a link called "Global Development" that lets you see where in Japan the body seal testing occurred. What?! Huh? Yes, if you care, you can learn how the car is a global development effort. Seems like an odd thing to share when GM is doing its best to say it is an American car company that needs to be saved. Not that global manufacturing is any secret, it just seems very disconnected to the brand of the Camaro -- a classic American muscle car. I'm just going to assume the inclusion of this content was not strategic, but rather an attempt to get some content added when budget is scarce.
The best part of the site is the well executed Compare page. It gives you a list of various direct and indirect competitors and lets you see how the Camaro is a better choice. Of course, it is your typical compare from an OEM website. So, the 0-60 times compare the Camaro against a model with the less powerful engine (eg BMW 328i instead of the twin-turbo 335i.) Comparison cherry-picking aside, it is well executed and also continues Chevy's tradition of adding credibility to the compares by including the Polk Automotive (third-party) logo.
The biggest gap in the execution is a lack of sharing. There is no way to share photos, tell a friend, all types of content extension are missing from the site, which is very odd for a passion product like Camaro. Though I did, after looking at the site a third time, notice you can share the videos but it is not very intuitive.
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