Carmakers - wake up!

Top Gear’s Pat Devereaux tells carmakers to wake up to social media

Every time the car market takes a slide, you see the same stories in the press: carmakers cutting their marketing budgets. A couple of weeks ago it was the turn of GM’s straight-talking marketing boss, Mark LaNeve, to hand out the bad news to his agencies. In the next couple of weeks, you are going to see more of that for sure.

On the face of it, it looks like common sense. The carmakers are selling fewer cars and making less money, so they have less cash to spend on advertising and marketing in general. So they slash the ad budgets and the agencies produce fewer ads. Makes sense, right?

Wrong. How is producing fewer ads ever going to help an ailing brand get back to health again? It’s not. Stands to reason, if fewer people can see and read about your product, fewer people are probably going to buy them. So you’ll have even less money, cut marketing even more and sell even fewer cars.

Follow that to its not-so-logical conclusion and you stop marketing altogether, give up selling cars and start a watermelon farm instead. I know that sounds ridiculous, but then what they are doing is ridiculous. How can you sell something if people don’t know it’s there?

It’s only going to get worse, too. As the world downsizes itself into smaller cars, the amount of profit per car is going to shrink. So there will be even less money for the marketers to play with, and, well, you know the rest.

But it need not be this way. Rather than cancelling a chunk of the schedule, the car marketers need to be looking for new ways of selling their cars to people for less money. Ways that can reach their target audience cheaply and effectively, with hard results so they can see what their money has bought them.

It might sound like a pipedream, but that way is available now and it’s called social media. And I’m not just talking about Facebook and MySpace. Smaller networks like asmallworld.net are just as relevant, too.

So it’s time for the hidebound auto industry to stop dismissing social media as a teenage crush and start taking it seriously. Particularly now that all networks offer remarkably detailed information on their users to advertisers, the ‘spray and pray’ approach to advertising on social media is over.

That’s not to say it’s a simple matter of marketing agencies picking up the phone and sending all their money to the web teams. It requires a new style of creative thinking, which the car marketing industry has been lacking for years, to make it work.

But it’s an option that really cannot be ignored for much longer. It requires one firm to get it going but, once one does, I’m sure the rest will follow fast. If they don’t, they could just cut themselves to death.