Hyundai ‘Zags’ Beyond Trusted Advisor Status
March 23, 2009
John Moore writes about the salience of the Hyundai sales campaign that we’ve all been waiting to see the results on. In one of my previous workshops, I mentioned this innovative campaign by Hyundai called the Hyundai Assurance plan. It works like this: if you lost your job after buying a new Hyundai, you could walk away from your loan or lease and return the car to Hyundai.
I really like Hyundai. I actually thought that they should have gotten a lot more credit for going to the 10 year warranty a long time before anyone else (and now GM is running around advertising it like they’re the shit…let’s see them take Cadilac off dinosaur status and chase the Genesis)… but I digress.
What’s mindblowing about this whole thing is the Hyundai’s sales are UP by 5% over last year’s numbers. When the rest of the auto industry is down to the tune of 40%. Moreover, not a single car has been returned. According to the NYT magazine article:
As of early March, no Hyundai buyer had yet returned a vehicle bought under the Assurance umbrella. This raises the intriguing point about what sort of consumer is being reassured. Probably anybody who is really afraid of losing a job simply isn’t going to buy a car right now. But somebody whose insecurity is more abstract, who perhaps simply needs a rationale for a big-ticket purchase at a moment when the headlines are full of doom — that’s different.
The call to action for marketers is this:
What are you doing for your customers to assure them that “you’re in this with them” and willing to put some skin into their game?
For what it’s worth, I don’t see this is being a strategy that’s deployed by everyone, but just as PPC has changed the game and brought performance based advertising to the fore, perhaps this “we’re in this with you” strategy will too have its place. It sure as hell beats the employee pricing or 0% financing schemes. Sure, we love saving money, but as marketers, dropping your drawers on price is not considered marketing innovation.
Finally, I would certainly not put this into the category of Hyundai being a thought leader, but they have definately positioned themselves as a bit of a trusted advisor to auto buyers everywhere.
