Infiniti Teases New JX 7-Seater Premium Crossover, will go on Sale in 2012

Infiniti is planning to enter new territories by introducing an all-new 7-seater luxury crossover designated the JX. Teased here in a blurry sketch, the mid-size model will be shown in concept form at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance this August, and in production guise at the 2011 Los Angeles Auto Show in November, before going on sale in the U.S. in spring 2012 as a 2013 model.

“The all-new Infiniti JX crossover will allow us to continue to expand the Infiniti brand’s presence in the Americas,” said Carlos Tavares, chairman, Nissan Americas.

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Nissan to Show New Versa and a Motorsports Concept in New York, Infiniti to Announce New Addition to Range

One by one, automakers are revealing their plans for the upcoming 2011 New York International Auto Show. This time we have news from Nissan and its luxury division Infiniti. Starting with Nissan, the Japanese firm will debut a “new compact sedan” and a “new, zero emission motorsports concept”. While we have don’t have any information yet on the concept study, from what we know, the compact sedan will be the next generation of the Versa that was teased in an official sketch back in late 2010.

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2011 Infiniti FX Updated with New Features in Europe

Infiniti has rolled out the 2011 FX in Europe. For the new model year, the Japanese firm’s SUV gains new convenience and safety features along with new color and trim combinations, while keeping the same engine range, which includes two petrol units and a diesel option. Read more »

Infiniti G37 Coupe S gets into Rally Guise for the Needs of the Spanish Rally Championship

To answer your first question, no, Infiniti is not going to compete in a European rally. What the company is doing is to supply a G37 Coupe S as a safety car for the Rallies Championship of Spain. The so-called ‘Infiniti Work Car Zero’ began its duties in the Rally of Villajoyosa on April 1. It is based on the G37 Coupe with power coming from an all-aluminum 3.7-liter V-6 engine that produces 320HP and 360 Nm (265.5 lb-ft) of torque at 7,000 rpm, and is linked to a six-speed manual transmission.

The Infiniti Car Zero is very close to standard specification with only a few modifications necessary for rally duty, such as the Vimesa roll bar, Bilstein dampers, Galfer brake pads, additional lights , siren, communications equipment and a GPS.

Sparco supplied the racing seats and seatbelts, the fire extinguishing system and equipment for the drivers. Finally, the car rides on high performance Michelin Pilot SuperSport tires.

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Buick Goes for an Emotional Brand Campaign for NCAA

Buick is sponsoring the NCAA and as part of that effort they launched a new series of inspirational videos featuring several athletes who have overcome adversity. The campaign is called the Human Highlight Reel and as part of the launch Buick bought the homepage ad unit on YouTube last Monday.

This is all part of Buick's transformation or is it reclamation as the brand moves upmarket as a premium brand. This is the segment brands like Lincoln, Acura, Infiniti and to some extent Cadillac has played in for the past couple decades. Some people also call them segment affordable luxury. It's that awkward place between general consumer and luxury consumer vehicles, essentially the brands that cannot directly compete with the likes of Mercedes, BMW, Audi and Lexus; although, Lexus is a primary target of all these brands. Lexus breaks convention as they have beaten the Germans in some vehicle segments.

Buick wants to own the Premium space and as Cadillac continues to evolve and yes become a direct competitor with German luxury brands, now is the time for General Motors to show keeping the Buick brand, after closing several others, was a good decision. Fortunately, the products are getting better but the brand itself still has a major way to go as it assumes a more lofty aspirational brand identity.



The Human Highlight Reel campaign is a fairly typical attempt at facilitating the brand change. I'm sure the consumer research came back showing that Buick considers or the aspirational customers Buick wants to attract are free thinking (think brand agnostic), self motivated people who don't want to follow the herd. As a way to attract these consumers, the brand is trying to appeal to that person through inspirational content that shows the spirit the brand wants to embody or at least thinks its desired customers embody.

I'll admit it is personally difficult for me to see Buick as anything other than my mom's car. She had a nice, yellowish 1976 Buick Skylark coupe. It was mom's car from 1976 until the late 1980s when she finally sold it. Amazingly, it looked just as good the day she let go of it as when she bought it off the car lot. I definitely get my cleanliness when it comes to cars from my mom (my dad's Nissan Sentra had several weeks old McDonalds bags and various trash all over the floor. No wonder they got divorced.)

Fortunately, others may be more open to the Buick brand than I am and fortunately too they are making some solid products to back up the marketing change, because it doesn't matter how bad you want to attract new customers - you have to have the right products to meet the desired change.

Find of the Day: Infiniti G35 Dressed Up as a Nissan GT-R

Usually, it’s Nissan owners that want to upgrade to a model from sister company Infiniti, but in this case, it’s the other way around. Found for sale in Quebec by Carscoop reader Caroline is this Nissan GT-R wannabe based on the Infiniti G35 Coupe. From what we can tell, the owner’s budget dried out after he or she finished the front end that now resembled the R35 with a bespoke grille and front bumper assembly. Read more »

Infiniti to Enter Australia’s Luxury Car Market in 2012 with FX, G37 and M Models

Infiniti continues to expand its reach around the world and has now confirmed plans to begin sales of its range of sedans, coupes and crossovers in Australia from the third quarter of 2012. The introduction in Australia follows the presentation of the premium brand in the UK, Western Europe and select Asia Pacific markets.

The Japanese company said it will create Infiniti Centres in each of the three major east coast capitals of the country in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. The initial lineup will include the FX sport crossover, G37 hardtop convertible and coupe, and the M luxury sedan.

"As part of Infiniti's worldwide expansion, Australia is a mandatory next step for the luxury brand," said Dan Thompson CEO, Infiniti Cars Australia. "In a little more than a year, the promise of luxury vehicles with a unique combination of inspired performance, attentive hospitality and unparalleled quality will become a reality for the Australian market.”

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Infiniti’s 2012 M Hybrid Campaign Takes a Swipe at Lexus GS 450h

‘Remember’ is the name of Infiniti’s new campaign for the 2012 M Hybrid, which is set to launch in the USA in spring of 2011 with prices starting from $53,700. The 31 second spot takes us on a quick journey through the history of hybrids, beginning with the first hybrid car in 1888, to the hybrid patent in 1909, and through the hybrids of the 1970s on to today’s hybrid models including the Lexus GS 450h, which can be seen in the ad parked on the road.

According to Infiniti, the 2012 M Hybrid directly challenges “the notion that you can’t have great performance and great fuel economy” adding that its model is the only car in America that delivers 360 horsepower and 32 miles-per-gallon (highway) – combined fuel economy is rated at 29mpg.

There’s no mention in the commercial on the model that single handedly made hybrids a household word bringing the technology to the masses – we’re talking of course about the first generation Toyota Prius.

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Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: July 2010

BMW and Audi are definitely proving all it takes to drive significant Fans on Facebook is a healthy marketing budget. Both brands had over 40% gains in July and both crossed the laudable 1 Million-Fan mark. Considering it took BMW years to cross the half-a-million-fan mark back in February 2010, where they celebrated the milestone by launching a YouTube video, it is interesting to see how ad impressions on the social media site can drive significant gains for aspirational, luxury car brands. (Note: the BMW Facebook Fan page was assumed by the brand in November 2009 where it had been managed and originally created by a BMW dealer in Spain. So, the first 1/2 million fans was dominantly, if not entirely, gained organically.)

Some of the smaller volume brands like Mitsubishi, Smart and Scion also experienced over 40% growth leading me to believe both also ran Facebook advertising this past month.

Toyota gained an impressive 38% fans in July. They were actively promoting their latest social media user generated content idea called “Auto-Biography” where the social media team selected a few stories to be “animated with the help of [their] artistic friends”… i.e. ad agency. This is interesting, as Toyota has been running several safety videos in response to their much publicized recalls.


Here we finally see Toyota recovering from the bad public relations and turning to the voice of the customer, which I think is a good move based on where the brand is today. Let the consumer voice showcase their passion for the products. It was a risky bet, except that Toyota approves every story before it is posted on the Facebook tab.

The only odd thing in July was a negative fan dip for the Infiniti brand. It would be interesting to see why this is happening. My guess is that some Infiniti fans are a bit turned off by the social media team’s wall posts promoting the Cirque du Soleil promotion; though, this guess is just that a guess. Looking at the fan page comments on the Cirque posts, several fans do enjoy the association. It still could be due to an increased frequency of the team pushing every marketing promotion on the page's wall. Without knowing the Facebook analytics and insight data, it is difficult for me to assess what is going on, perhaps their Facebook team should look at frequency of posts and also when the fan drop may have occurred since it is pretty rare to see a brand page lose fans in a month.

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: June 2010

Well after a fairly mild, ho-hum couple months life is heating up on the automotive brand fan pages with several companies upping their marketing on the site and a lot of double digital month-over-month growth from several brands in June.

The big battle of fans was last month’s BMW vs. Audi battle royal. It seems both brands answered the challenge by working hard to get new fans. BMW had a staggering 36% increase in fans which is an insane growth percentage from a brand with already the highest numbers of major automotive fans on the social media site. They added 244,181 fans in one month!

Audi did very well too with a 16% growth rate and 103,255 fans added in June. That’s almost the total amount of Toyota Facebook fans; 107,389 fans to be exact.


I’m still trying to figure out what BMW and Audi did to drive so many “Likes” in one month. My guess is outreach to owners through Become a Fan messaging and some social media marketing on Facebook, but I can’t confirm either.

Toyota did a lot of marketing on Facebook this month, but they didn’t do it to drive people to the Toyota fan page; instead, they took users to their Toyota Safety landing page where they are working on their safety perception issue after many recalls.

Lexus had its own Facebook goals where they drove consumers to their Facebook fan page by enticing them with the new halo vehicle advertisement for the new LFA super car. The message must be getting through as my own father in-law, not a car guy at all, started asking me about the LFA one day on a Home Depot run; though, he saw the ad on television.

Honda reignited their love machine this month by running Facebook ads for their Everybody Knows Somebody Who Loves a Honda Facebook application and they even did a Father’s Day ad that tied in that Day’s message with Honda’s own campaign message (sorry I had a screenshot of the ad but must not have saved it.)


Mini and Infinti both had big jumps in fans with 32% and 43% gains respectively. Infiniti ran a campaign promoting their Cirque du Soleil contest that brought users to a Facebook tab promoting the contest. Meanwhile, Mini had its fun challenging Porsche to a race.

The Mini vs. Porsche effort definitely spawned some major engagement with its fans that mostly loved the idea of challenging the all mighty Porsche 911.

It certainly was a crazy June on Facebook. I’m curious what July will bring.


UPDATE: Thanks to one of my new Twitter followers @ChrisBrashear it seems Audi ran a photo upload contest in June which I'm sure was supported with some ad dollars on the site too.

Infiniti, First to Place Owner Reviews on Their Site

I was going to write an in-depth article this morning about Infiniti's new implementation of owner reviews on its shopping site http://www.infinitiusa.com. The use of consumer reviews on an OEM website is the first implementation I have seen from a U.S. automaker.

Why is Infiniti the first to do this? I don't know. I do know that every other automaker has thought about it or has been pitched it by at least one consultant. Having been in discussion years ago about such a proposal, the big road block for many automakers is liability. Allowing people to write whatever issues or problems they have about your car on the manufacturer's own site adds a level of knowledge about a problem that could come back to cause an OEM issues say with a future recall or other litigation issue (by the way this personal example is not from my current client. It is from a past discussion with another automaker years ago.)

So Infiniti has decided to allow "owner reviews", not consumer reviews, but owner reviews. The difference is the reviews cannot be entered by just anyone. They have to entered by some who currently or in the past owned an Inifiniti. At least that's what I believe.

I tried entering an owner review on their site, but there is no place to do such a thing. I click on "Did you find this review helpful?" On one of the existing reviews and am told, "We're sorry, you must be logged in to submit feedback. Please go back and log in prior to submission."

Okay, but where do I log in? I search the navigation, looked all around the reviews section, and I even created a owner profile using a VIN number and providing some personal information. I was able to setup an owner account and log into the owner's section, but still there was no way to submit feedback on any vehicle review page.

As it stands now, I was completely unable to figure out how an owner enters a review on Infiniti's site leaving me to wonder where are these reviews coming from? I checked Yahoo Auto's since the review format looked very similar, but no luck.

It is interesting Infiniti is showing owner reviews on its site. I browsed several models and found, unsurprisingly, that most people who spent $40k-$70k on an Infiniti felt good about their decision and wrote a positive review.

There were a few issues people had with their cars and some reviews gave 3 instead of 5 stars on a few criteria. I'm also quite certain that reviews are moderated by the company, meaning they have to be approved before going live on Infiniti's site. I wanted to test this idea but with no place to enter a review I was unable to see how that process works.

Infiniti's use of owner reviews is an interesting one and research from other shopping experiences (shoes, electronics, etc.) In one 2009 study, a U.K. electronic parts supplier found that reviews increased conversions by 14.2%. Other examples exist in e-commerce research showing conversions/transactions do have a positive increase on a site when reviews are there; though, I have seen studies that it only applies to products with favorable reviews. Products with mediocre response tend to have lesser transactions.

Well it will be interesting to see who else follows Infiniti's lead or if others follow at all. Personally, I feel consumer reviews for cars exist in so many places where online auto shoppers already are, that providing them on the OEM site is rather pointless; though, I'm sure some disagree with me.

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: March 2010

It’s getting pretty interesting on Facebook these days. Facebook is finally making brand Fan pages, oops I mean Like pages – more on that later, clearly pages owned by brands. Unofficial pages will soon move to the new Facebook Community pages designation with some changes in functionality, plus if they reach some threshold of fans they turn into community ran pages (think Wiki.)

The Like pages, okay they will still be called Fan Pages, will change a commonly held behavior where people “Become a Fan” of a brand or product. Soon people will simply “Like” a brand or product page. According to Facebook, people choose Like significantly more than they choose Become a Fan; though, how is this really that surprising when one can Like just about everything on Facebook? By design, Like should garner far more clicks than Become a Fan, but someone looked at some data and didn’t think about the user interface already in place to justify the decision.


Free Cars & Basketball

The big news this month was a nicely ran promotion from Infiniti that was done to support a College Basketball bracket game on CBS Sports. Infiniti ran banner ads supporting their marketing of the new M37/M56 models where one could win a new M.

What was interesting is that Infiniti also bought some media on Facebook supporting the CBS Bracket Challenge but also gave people an opportunity to Become a Fan of the Infiniti fan page. In the day or two the ad started running on Facebook, Infiniti added around 50,000 fans. Now I never know how many impressions a brand bought to get such a gain, but it is still an impressive upswing for the brand and the combination with the College Basketball passion point surely helped increase engagement.

Jeep was an interesting one this month too. They ran a Tweet-to-Win contest to increase the exposure of their @Jeep Twitter account, but to find out when Jeep was going to ask a trivia question for their Twitter contest people had to visit the Jeep Facebook page to learn the time. One would think this promotion would also increase Facebook fan page numbers for Jeep since they were giving away a free Jeep Wrangler Islander Edition. Unfortunately, Jeep had typical fan growth that ran in the 3% increase realm for March, in other words no gain from the Tweet-to-Win contest; though they did have significant follower growth on Twitter (more here.)


Continuous Marketing

Several brands continued running ads throughout most of the month of March, if not all of March. They included Mazda, Dodge and Toyota; though, Toyota’s ads were not a promotion to increase Fans of their fan page; rather, they promoted Toyota loyalty (you can learn more about that effort by reading my post on Toyota’s marketing loyalty.)

The Mazda and Dodge ads were constantly showing up on my Facebook pages even though I’m already a fan of both brands. This makes me wonder two things. Does Facebook not support a good retargeting message capability on their site or is it that the Facebook inventory of relevant ads is so small they keep serving me the same units? Seems it could be a little of both and one would think after a brand has gained that person as a fan that other messages could be sent to support further brand engagement.



Housecleaning

Lincoln has officially taken over their fan page and now are doing regular updates yet still not Become a Fan campaigns or promotion of the page (full disclosure: I'm involved with this effort.) Scion had asked their unofficial fan page to be identified as such last month, well now we know why as Scion has started an official Facebook page that had it's first post Monday March 29, 2010.

In European Facebook news, Aston Martin finally took ownership of a friendly URL for their fan page http://www.facebook.com/astonmartin. Also, I changed my tracking of SMART as I follow the global fan pages for BMW and MINI so it seemed appropriate to follow SMART's global page instead of it's USA specific fan page.



Download the Excel file: Facebook Auto Fan File (March 2010)

Audi and Infiniti Debut New Vehicles on Facebook

A lot is going on when it’s Auto Show week. With the Los Angeles Auto Show in full swing, automakers were looking for ways to involve those who couldn’t visit the land of swimmin’ pools and movie stars.

Audi and Infiniti decided to bring their reveal events online to the popular social networking site Facebook. The Infiniti event was an online look into the reveal happening in conjunction with the LA Auto Show. The Audi event was held on the opposite coast in Miami with some additional corporate promotion. Both events used the same template construct with a live video feed and Facebook chat.

Audi’s Miami Talk Show

“Since our inception, Audi has embraced progress in the quest to create groundbreaking technologies and deliver new ideas to the road. Just as artists make it a mission to work for the untold future, so does Audi design to be relevant not just today, but for many years to come,” said Rupert Stadler, Chairman of the Board of Management, Audi AG

That statement is representative of how painful it was to watch the Audi A8 reveal on Facebook last Monday evening. Just imagine that language repeated ad nauseam for 30 minutes and you'll understand why the chat participants on Facebook started to get a bit rowdy.

The event started nicely enough with TV and film star Lucy Liu welcoming everyone to the event and sharing how Audi is entrenched in design and why they were making the U.S. debut of the new Audi A8 at the Art Basel Miami Beach.

A welcoming is nice and expected, but then things got a bit weird. Lucy invited several people up to discuss design and the Miami community’s commitment to art. The discussion went on and on and on like a Sergio Marchionne press event. Chat participants started mocking the Miami community, Lucy Liu, and were getting very frustrated with Audi wasting everyone’s time talking about things they didn’t care about. I was personally waiting for an artistic discussion on chiaroscuro and its meaning in Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delight”.

Eventually Audi revealed the A8, but it was too much of wait for me personally as I had things to do with my family that evening. My wife’s patience was really being tried and well she wins. I caught the photos of the car on Jalopnik that evening and everything looked pretty good and mostly followed the Sport Back Concept Audi showed last January at the Detroit Auto Show.

Infiniti Shows Us How It’s Done

Last night was the second Facebook vehicle reveal, this time from Infiniti. They showed off some minor changes to the G sedan and were mainly promoting the unveiling of the 2011 Infiniti M.

Maybe Infiniti watched the chat discussion from Audi’s event and decided it was best to keep things on topic. They welcomed everyone sans celebrity, showed off the G sedan, then briefly talked about the key message for the M, and pulled the car cover off the new M. All of this took 16 minutes from start to finish. It was short and sweet.

Conversation at the Infiniti event mainly stayed on topic, because it was respectful of people’s time. Most importantly the presentation was all about the cars. Simple. Effective.

While companies may want to make their online reveal more of an event by having a celebrity host and tying it in with some philanthropic effort, it is best to keep the event to the reason why people came. Watching something like this on the web is not the same as being trapped in a seat at a Miami auditorium. Internet users can come and go very easily. Plus they didn't get any hors d'uvres or have an incentive to stay for a picture with a Charlie's Angel.

Buzz Study Releases First Social Automotive Brands Report

Buzz Study is a blog maintained by software company infegy. Their social media product, Social Radar, is a social media tracking tool. To promote their tool, they produce a monthly Top 50 Social Brands list that is now being accompanied by a first ever Top Social Automotive Brands report (U.S. market only.) The first example was published Tuesday. You can see it here.


How are brands measured? Well according to Buzz Study the Top Automotive report uses the same methodology as the Top 50 report they publish. "To create the Top 50 list, we used Social Radar to analyze millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web during April 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during April 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions, which would be more heavily influenced by big fans who post frequently about a specific brand."

One of the things Buzz Study doesn't mention about their ranking is what significance there is of having a top ranking? There is no sentiment study posted showing if buzz is good or bad. You only simply learn if there is a lot of discussion going on across the web. In Chrysler's case, this probably isn't a good thing.

Ford came out on top in the automotive brands and #25 on the all brands Top 50 report. When your CEO is on YouTube Twittering with his Head of Social Media Scott Monty, it isn't that surprising. Plus there are some big campaign pushes in the social space, like The Fiesta Movement.

Brands with very few owners, brand advocates or an older customer will likely not improve much on this list. Also, brands with very limited marketing budgets or no new product news will place low too. That's probably why we see brands like Buick, Mercury, Lincoln, and Suzuki at the bottom.

The surprising one at the end of the list is Infiniti which has a very hot, buzz worthy pool of products like the G37 and FX. This just shows that Infiniti isn't really investing in this space and is not part of their media mix right now. One trite example I did was Google "infiniti social media", one of the top spots for the automotive brand is a G20.net enthusiast site. If you don't know, Infiniti hasn't made the G20 for seven years. Point made.

On the other hand, BMW has been very active on Facebook, iPhone (yes I knew iPhone is not social media, but doing things on iPhone generates social media buzz) and has a large amount of brand oriented blogs, even one that I run. Sorry had to promote my other blog for a second. BMW hasn't made any push into Twitter, showing that you don't need to be in every social media environment to have an impact.

It is an interesting report and could be a data point to see how large-scale social media marketing efforts by automotive brands can impact their ranking on Buzz Study's report; though, I'm sure infegy would rather you just purchase their social media tracking product to analyze your efforts.