Ever since Henry Ford found a way to mass produce automobiles that took the car from an expensive luxury to something within many people’s prize range, car marketing has been influencing our tastes and desires. With over a centuries-worth of business behind it, the automobile industry still provides as valuable lessons today just as it had been all those decades back. Paying close attention to some of the strategies employed by Alfa Romeo, BMW, Ford and more? Could just help your business better market itself.
Let’s take a look at three marketing tricks from the automobile world that might just help you better your business.
The Product Itself is the Best Marketing Strategy
Just as today’s growth hacking marketers are finding out by constantly tweaking their products to take the leg work out of marketing, the automobile world found out long ago that product design is the best form of marketing itself.
Take for example the Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint. First launched in 1954, its eye-catching design captured the public’s imagination at first sight, so much so that 60 years later the car is still in production (albeit with an updated model) today.
Get your product or service right. Make it eye-catching and attention-grabbing from the beginning. That way your marketing campaigns become only supplementary. The product does most of the talking.
Personality Reflected in the Product
Another key way automobile manufacturers appeal to prospective customers is by infusing the idea that cars are extensions of people’s personalities. BMW, for example, communicate that luxury and efficiency is an indication of high social status and high-powered careers. Subaru, on the other hand, go in a different direction, riffing on freedom and outdoor adventure and exploring how that fits into their customer’s personality.
These individual brand images are what help cement this idea of personality in the mind of the customer. Marketing a product in a specific way, appealing to people’s emotions and the ways in which they might like to see themselves, is a well-favoured strategy from the automobile marketing world and works just as effectively in any other sector.
Utilitarian Characteristics
Away from emotional-based marketing, the automobile world also makes good work of emphasising utilitarian characteristics of their products too. This is most visible in the way marketing campaigns make it an imperative to also mention safety features, the number of seats and the type of mileage a vehicle provides.
Ford, for example, emphasise the utilitarian characteristics of their cars much more than say Ferrari or Lamborghini, in order to appeal to a different customer base that might value these features more than the hedonistic ones that promise social elevation.
The bottom line? Also mention what your product does and how it does it too. Customers want to know about its utilitarian use just as much as they do its feel-good promise.
Businesses, no matter what the product or service is that they offer, can learn a lot about successful marketing techniques by looking at the leading campaigns of varying automobile brands. Just as these three aforementioned strategies hope to have highlighted, the world of automobile marketing is applicable to a wide range of products to say the least.