Culture Shift

Julie Roehm knows how to turn heads.

As brand manager overseeing the launch of the Focus compact, Roehm’s been driving a tricked-up prototype of the car Ford Motor Co. hopes will win Gen X and Echo Boomers, those under-35, entry-level buyers. Roehm’s Focus is no kiddie car: black leather interior, chrome wheels, metallic dash and door accents. “People are used to seeing prototypes around here in Detroit, but I’m still getting looks,” Roehm says.

She’s only just begun.

Ford is reinventing its whole approach to marketing this fall with the estimated $100 million Focus launch, sowing a grassroots buzz among Echo Boomers. For six months, Ford will loan a spiffed-up Focus to 120 trendsetters in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco. The longer these disc jockeys, concert promoters, club owners, and the like drive Focus, the cooler it’ll seem to the rest of us. Ford is pointedly downplaying the promotion: “We don’t want to do too much p.r. action [around the loaners] and overcommercialize it,” Roehm explains. “We’d rather let the car validate itself.”

Part of the Focus buzz goes commercial, though, with a campaign of 64 live TV spots that broke Sept. 9 on the MTV Music Video Awards. (Focus also hosted Awards parties in NYC, L.A., and Miami.) The 18-month campaign stars TBS’s Dinner & A Movie host Annabelle Gurwitch in different locations around the country. Three spots aired during the Awards; the next flight is in March during prime time. Spots run simultaneously on Focus’s Web site, where viewers also can see the set before and after each one airs. J. Walter Thompson, Detroit, handles; Ford does the loaner program in-house.

Roehm won’t say what agency Ford used to find its trendy targets. Accessing trendsetters is the latest big secret in promotion marketing. Agencies that tap into the underground of cool subculture like to wear a clandestine cloak. Divining the mystery of what comes next, after all, is their bread and butter. Tobacco, alcohol, and soft drink marketers have aggressively courted trendmakers to endorse their brands in the anti-commercial culture. Ford is new to the in-crowd.

Focus buyers get a “welcome package” including a Baby-G or G Shock watch. Ford follows up six months later by mailing a dashboard picture frame that matches the car’s interior. Then there are the “options” offers: The pet package includes a water bottle, leash/seatbelt, and air purifier; the sports package has a roof rack customized to the driver’s sport and a backpack that slides over the front seat; the “express yourself” package comes with decals, funky gearshifts, and fleece or neoprene seat covers.

“Our [premiums] vendors are having a ball with it. We tell them to go find us the wackiest stuff and bring us a sample,” Roehm laughs.

Ford will also use marketing alliances with hot brands in music, fashion, sports, and technology to create feature cars. Every quarter, Focus will offer a tricked-up co-branded car – with seat covers, floor mats, and paint colors by a hot fashion designer, say – in small quantities of 5,000 to 10,000 units. “We’ll pulse it and take it away,” Roehm says. Production lead-time of six months makes Ford flexible enough to hit trends while they’re hot.

Focus also sponsors Rolling Stone’s college tour through November, along with a slew of on-campus concerts and events across the country, with signage and car displays at events.

In all, it’s a new, er, focus for Ford. “We’ve gotten to a comfort level on how to reach the traditional audience. But we have to shift gears to reach this new generation,” Roehm says. Ford is helping dealers do that with training sessions in 30 cities that spend half the time explaining the car, the other half explaining the audience. Dealers also get videotapes of Gen X’ers and Echo Boomers talking about what they want when they visit a dealership – giving dealers a vocabulary lesson in the process. Sales kits and a Web site for dealers carry fun info and quizzes on Echo Boomers. “We bombard them with information before these people come in, so they know how to handle it,” Roehm explains. “Now they’re all talking the talk, saying `phat’ and stuff.”

Ford expects to skew older despite its under-35 positioning. “My mom drove the car and she was surprised how well she liked it,” Roehm says. “She’s 50, and she figured a Mercury Cougar would be more her speed. We present the marketing plan to people in their 40s and 50s and they say, `I don’t know if I’m cool enough for this.’ But I tell them, `Everyone is cool deep down. The fact that you recognize this is cool means you’re cool enough.'”

Drive-in movies

Other automakers are opting for longer alliances than Ford’s in-and-out “episodic marketing” plan. General Motors hooked up in August with Warner Bros. for a four-year, reported $200 million marketing deal encompassing GM’s 54 brands and Warner Bros.’s Studio Stores, theme parks, and film, TV, and music properties (September promo). The two will pair on at least 15 promotions. “This lets us by-pass the laborious process of selling in [to partners] and cut right to developing powerful consumer promotions,” says Jordan Solitto, Warner Bros. senior vp-promotions and Studio Stores marketing.

The deal took a year to negotiate, and it’s non-exclusive. “That’s key,” Solitto asserts. “We get all the benefits of a major alliance without the downside of being shackled to each other. This is marketing, not marriage.”

The first joint work is a separate three-year licensing deal for the Chevy Venture minivan. A Warner Bros. edition introduced this fall comes with a built-in video system and a three-year membership in an affinity program called VentureTainment. Buyers get two videos (chosen from six) and a membership card good for Warner Bros. discounts and special services. Mailings every six months give more retail discounts, theme park specials, sneak previews of films, and other high-value rewards.

“This is not tchotchke stuff,” Solitto says. “This isn’t little 10-percent-off coupons.” Chevy maintains the owner database, which Warner can access for its own marketing programs. In turn, Chevy can target potential customers among the Looney Tunes fans in Warner’s database. The partners handle VentureTainment in-house, with outside fulfillment; Chevy’s ad agency, Detroit-based Campbell-Ewald, handles collateral support.

The club “gives us a way to stay in touch with buyers for three years,” says GM spokesman Dan Hubbert. Chevy sold 62,713 Ventures through July, running three percent behind ’98 sales. The company expects to rebound in the second half to best last year’s total of 97,362 vans sold. Elsewhere, GM’s Oldsmobile division reprises its tie-in with Turner-Time Warner and Blockbuster Video for the Silhouette Premiere minivan.

Olds has promoted aggressively for three years as part of an image makeover. The brand aims even younger, hipper, and more female this year, with promos for Intrigue pegged to Saturday Night Live’s 25th anniversary and People Magazine’s 25th anniversary concert, “Carole King: Making Music with Friends,” this month.

The SNL promo centered on an Intrigue SNL25 sweepstakes that let viewers vote for their favorite SNL character. Fans voted via phone or at snl25.com and were automatically entered in the sweeps. Fourteen winners get trips to New York City sometime this season for a backstage tour and dress rehearsal, dubbed “the Intrigue behind SNL.” Grand prize is a 2000 Intrigue GLS. TV and print ads running through September sent fans to the site to vote. The top three picks were presented as finalists on the Sept. 26 anniversary show, and fans called in during the show to voteagain. SNL announces the winning character – and the Intrigue winner – on SNL’s Oct. 2 season opener. Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, worked with NBC to coordinate the promotion.

Olds’s partnership with SNL is “unorthodox,” says director of advertising and promotion Mike Sands, but it’s “precisely the message that needs to get across to our younger, more sophisticated audience: expect something new from Oldsmobile.”

Olds also is expected to sponsor Sheryl Crow’s U.S. tour next year, with ticket giveaways at dealerships.

Superhero’s welcome

At the beginning of the year, DaimlerChrysler was “cautiously optimistic” about the spring kickoff of its mulit-year alliance with Universal Studios, offering Dodge owners discounted packages to the opening of Universal’s Islands of Adventure theme park (May promo). Dodge initially planned to host 5,000 owners and families, then upped its projection to 20,000. In the end, the offer pulled 12,000 visitors. “It was heartening to see how much people appreciated being treated well, with no strings attached,” says DaimlerChrysler spokesman Mike Rosenau. “It caught them off guard,” and dissipated Chrysler’s caution. “Universal’s reach is so broad, we won’t be restricted by caution anymore.”

The company is looking at Universal properties now for 2000 tie-ins. Promos take a backseat for fourth quarter as Dodge affixes its new tagline, “Dodge Different,” via an ad blitz. Image spots broke Sept. 1, with product-specific executions following this month. Eventually, Dodge will weave in Universal and other marketing partners, Rosenau says. BBDO, Detroit, handles ads; Ross Roy Communications, Detroit, handles promotions.

Separately, Daimler and Chrysler marked their merger with an exchange-student program for children of employees. Forty American, Canadian, and German kids in the Youth Beyond Borders program spent three weeks visiting overseas. American and Canadian teens who visited German families this summer will host German teens next year. The program pilot was open to kids of hourly and salaried employees in Detroit, Windsor, Ontario, and Sindelfingen. DaimlerChrysler got 700 applications and chose participants via lottery.

Car dealers like promotions that bring consumers into the showroom, but most are ill-equipped to follow up with potential buyers. Fewer than 10 percent of consumers get a phone call or letter after they visit a showroom. Even worse, dealers only manage to retain 25 percent of past customers on average. The weak link is often an archaic computer system that purges names from the dealer’s database every six to 12 months.

A new Internet-based service remedies that. Direct marketing agency Advantage Integrated Marketing, St. Louis, launched a Customer Management System that builds dealership databases online. At least 20 dealers have hired AIM to build and maintain individual databases. First, AIM purifies a dealer’s existing database of customer information, purging duplications and updating addresses and phone numbers. Second, AIM creates a site where dealers (or AIM’s staff) enter all new sales, prospect, and service info. Dealers collect prospect data via showroom sweepstakes entries. To track new buyers and service customers, AIM extracts info three times a week from the dealer’s purchase and service records. The list is updated quarterly, and dealers can access it anytime via AIM’s Web site.

Third, AIM phones buyers and prospects with survey questions that add more data – asking how they liked the dealership, for example, or when they plan to buy. AIM e-mails updates to dealers, who can follow up. Reports can be sorted by date range, employee, city, or dealership.

Dealers pay $69 per car sold. To help fund the month-to-month service, AIM offers dealers a “customer care pack” with $3,000 in services for new buyers. The pack includes a service checkbook, emergency roadside assistance, towing reimbursement, vacation packages, and supermarket coupons. Dealers sell the pack to car buyers for $169 – $69 pays for the database service, and the other $100 is new revenue for the dealer. AIM fulfills pack orders.

Last month, AIM launched carHQ.com, giving consumers general auto info and links to 6,000 dealer sites built by the agency. A companion site for dealers, dealerHQ.com, posts sales leads generated by the consumer site. AIM is selling ads on dealerHQ.com.