Volkscycle
My late mother was the most incredibly optimistic person I’ve ever known. A favorite family story, illustrative of her nature, is the one about the time Mom took me and my brother Gregory’s Cub Scout den to visit the county old folks home to distribute gifts after the holidays in January 1955.
After the Scouts sang a few songs, Mom and Aunt Christy passed out little gifts. At one point my aunt grabbed my mother’s sleeve urgently whispering, “Jean, Jean, you just gave that man over there a comb and brush set.” “What of it?” Mom blithely replied. “The man has no hair!” Christy blurted out.
Chagrined, my mother returned to the still-beaming old gent and told him she had meant to give him something better. Seconds later, Christy was back, hissing through clenched teeth, “Dammit Jean, you just gave that man a can of peanut brittle — and he has no teeth!”
That family story is an object lesson in the difference between giving something that’s nice versus giving a gift the person will really use. It’s a lesson the entire automotive industry would be wise to take to heart.
Here’s a group that spends billions of dollars advertising their brands, and yet from a promotional standpoint, it’s been the place where good ideas go to die. When they do promote, the industry standard is either a manufacturer’s rebate or 0% interest, or both. This strategy is akin to a boxer using his face to block punches: Sure, it works, but your chances of suffering bodily injury are virtually guaranteed.
“Great automotive marketing,” is an oxymoron like “military intelligence” or “jumbo shrimp,” but one automotive promotion absolutely rocked my world and had me kicking the tires of my own family’s fleet in the hopes that I could cost justify a new car. I’m still the poorer for not buying a Volkswagen Jetta Trek.
Arnold Worldwide won Volkswagen’s business in early 1995, and was charged with driving showroom visits and sales. It proceeded to create the renowned “Drivers Wanted” campaign for Volkswagen, one of the most awarded campaigns of the past 10 years.
But it wanted to do more. “We came up with free gas promotions, trips to Europe, cash-back incentives, the whole gamut of ideas,” Arnold President Fran Kelly recalls. “The creatives however wanted something cooler; something bold and innovative.”
The agency’s research indicated that Volkswagen’s target consumers were highly interested in active outdoor sports like mountain biking. It learned there were 15 million mountain bikers in the U.S. alone. Arnold realized it might be onto something.
“Volkswagen’s standard deal at that time was to spend up to $1,500 to sell a car,” notes Kelly. “We had to get the rebate needle out of VW of America, because, ultimately, when you give away money there’s no long term benefit to the brand.”
Arnold contacted Trek Bicycles. Though a top-engineered bike (that Lance Armstrong would pedal to championships in the Tour de France), Trek couldn’t touch the media exposure a campaign with a major brand like VW could give it.
Trek supplied a $1,000-value mountain bike for several hundred dollars. VW then took the unprecedented step of creating a new nameplate vehicle for the promotion: the Volkswagen Jetta Trek.
“German engineers don’t like promotional badging on their quality vehicles, but they instantly saw the value of this partnership and delivered a complete Jetta Trek package,” Kelly says. The new car debuted in 1996 with a special vehicle badge, cloth interior and a bike rack on the top that held the Jetta Trek mountain bike upright.
The promotion itself was the soul of simplicity: buy the car, get the bike and rack free.
“Dealers were excited because the car looked great in their showrooms with the bike mounted in its rack on top,” remembers Kelly. “What really got them pumped, though, was that they had more pricing power — no one could imitate this promotion; there wouldn’t be a Honda Trek, or Kia Trek, because it took us six months to do this deal.”
Significantly, the brand advertised heavily during the promotion’s 90-day run. “We put it on TV because we thought it was such an integral part of the brand,” explains Kelly. “Look at Nike or Apple or BMW: their promotions are every bit as branded as their brand is.”
The relationship with Trek gave VW entrée into the nation’s specialty bicycle channel. Arnold exploited this zealously, putting Jetta Trek collateral in thousands of bicycle stores.
The promotion was a runaway success, selling out at showrooms nationwide and producing above average margin on the product, thanks to the high perceived value and relatively low acquisition cost of the Trek bike itself.
Arnold had elevated car marketing from “price-off on the hood” to luxury gift-with-purchase in one fell swoop! VW repeated the Jetta Trek promotion in its entirety in 1997 and reprised the luxury GWP concept twice with other products. (Arnold worked with the company on its Golf K-2 Edition: Buyers of the new VW Golf K-2 got a free ski rack and a free set of K-2 skis. Then in 2003, it tied in the wildly popular Applie iPod with the VW Beetle for the “Pods Unite” campaign.)
The ultimate proof of the Jetta Trek’s penetration of the American psyche became clear to Kelly one day when he was vacationing in New England, out riding his own Jetta Trek bike alongside his son’s three wheeler.
“My son lost control of his bike and swerved into the side of the road. As I got off my bike to help him, I heard some rustlings on the other side of the fence along the road. Two little faces popped over the fence and we were confronted by a pair of curious young boys.”
“ ‘Hey mister,’ the first one asked me, spying my bike, ‘did you have to buy a car to get that bike?’ ‘Why yes, yes I did.’ I replied. ‘Is it a good car?’ he asked. ‘Yes it is,’ I replied confidently. ‘Is it a good bike?’ he pursued. ‘Yes, it is a good bike!’ I said.”
“Turning to his buddy and grinning, the young boy burst out, ‘Is that a good deal or what?!’”
Rod Taylor is senior VP-sales promotion and sports marketing at CoActive Marketing in Cincinatti, OH. Reach him at [email protected].
