Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Nobody expected that a Finnish company would come up with the idea of selling mobile phones.

Nobody expected that a Dutch company would dare to develop navigation systems.

Nobody expected that a Korean company would become the world leader in flatscreen technology.

And probably nobody expects that a Swiss company will build a car.

This is what it says on the website of Mindset, a new swiss company with a new car concept. In a time of a car industry in crisis, you could say: bad timing for a start-up, or: extreme opportunity to come up with a vision for what mobility means in the future, which in swiss unadornedness is:

We are not offering some future vision but a sustainable, contemporary automobile for everyday use. We at mindset know about cars and we want to attract people who like cars and enjoy driving.

Submitted by Florian Geiger

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Great use of optical illusion in this ad for the Mercedes Benz Vito.

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South Korean car giant Hyundai launched an interactive microsite through San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to promote the new-look Genesis Coupe.

Pro racing driver Rhys Millen hurls the car around a test track and the users can experience a white knuckle test-drive by switching between multiple camera angles, taking screenshots to store in an online gallery. An editing facility enables users to drag and drop clips into sequence to make a personalised film.

Hyundai also introduced its Assurance purchase promise: ‘Buy any new Hyundai and if in the next year, you lose your income, we’ll let you return it’.

See in www.edityourown.com

in: Contagious Magazine, nº18

It’s a really cool user-experience

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One very common digital lifestyle behavior is to decry everything out there (especially viral advertising) that might be a “fake.”

Utilitizing this insight, the folks at Mini shot their own fun, and different, viral.

via @fwa

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Great interaction, using the blackberry storm as a command to drive the car (first a small car.. then Hamilton driving with the mobile a real car)

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Easily read out data from your car.

In the 1990s, car mechanics started to say things like “This vehicle needs a driver update”. And they didn’t mean the owner needed additional training. Modern cars are increasingly software controlled and this software also collects drive statistics from miles to malfunctions. These are usually read out by garages and manufacturers and fed back into the product development cycles.

Fiat’s now gone and made (part of) this data available to the people who own and drive the cars. And that’s not just Excel-sheets for the statistically inclined, either … Fiat Eco:drive embeds the data dump into a campaign for efficient, eco-friendly and sustainable driving, complete with visualization, data-interpretation, a learning module and an online community for a worldwide effort to reduce emission. The initiative comes with a pretty neat website that explains the concept and houses the online community: Eco:drive.

There are several ways for brands to connect with people online:

• Seek Proximity: Place your logo next to popular content (or popular content into your brand’s space) - everything from banners to adgames.
• Afford experience: create ways for people to experience your brand or product in the digital realm - 3D panoramas, simulations, blogging customer service representatives, you name it …
• Evolve a digital core: Innovate your brand or individual products to benefit from and give benefit to the digitized, networked part of people’s lives. That’s high art. Fiat’s done it. Sweet.

To us, definitely a product innovation that has people at the center.

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A sand glass 12 meter high and 8 meter wide. Big enough to hide a car in it and that’s exactly what BMW did for the countdown of the launch of the new BMW 7 series. The sand glass is filled with silver balls which pass through and uncover the new BMW.

via

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Wired Magazine reports on 2 competing applications for the iPhone which bring a completely new use for mobile phones to the table. A tool for measuring car performance like speed, cornering and brake load to name a few. With car fanatics always being about customization and getting nitty gritty data, this could be a killer app.

Also, without wanting to spoil the fun, one measurement I could see being added is how much CO2 your make and model puts out to get to 60mph in 5.6 seconds?

What we will definitely see is a continuing trend (that started with the iPod) of more mobile applications and devices in cars, and manufacture’s anticipated response by building the necessary cradles for them.

More here

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We stumbled upon an AdWeek article by Gregory Solman which talks about a study by Todd Turner, examining car sales number correlations to ad spend. The study finds out that there seems to be none.

Says the article:

Example: Despite healthy ad spending and incentives on the relatively new Chevrolet Silverado—marketed by Interpublic Group’s Campbell-Ewald in Warren, Mich.—the vehicle lost roughly 1 percent market share in the large-truck segment. General Motors spent $240 million on ads for that vehicle alone last year and $85 million through May, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

In contrast, sales of the barely marketed Ford Ranger—which gets perhaps $100,000 in annual ad support through WPP Group’s JWT—has made a 4 percent gain in its segment through June in the flat compact-pickup class.

Turners concludes: No amount of marketing can make up for product that isn’t competitive in its segment.”

I believe this to be true. Of course, even great advertising can’t always sell a bad product. But is the Ford Ranger really more competitive, or are there other (seemingly random) factors at play?

There is something to be said about how marketing budgets are actually spent. There is a prevalent automatism to open the marketing toolbox and spend your budget on purely ads and conventional incentive promotions or other things. Doing that, it gets harder and harder to make pure share of voice work for you these days. Nowadays, where there is no more market for messaging, and where people’s are bombarded with 3500 messages a day on average, an approach of couching your product and brand with in the context of peoples’ lives and their behavior is a much better choice.

However, such an approach requires looking at people not just as demographic and typological milieus, but their behavior and contexts across all phases of their automotive customer life cycle. The type of insights you glean can help you understand what the brand can do to be part of people’s lives, as opposed to making people buy your product by hitting them over the head with it. Also, once you realize that a brand can genuinely own a human pupose, it also requires the guts to leave behind the marketing toolbox thinking and rather start addressing pain points and joy points of people’s experiences.

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