Specifically, the goal of the competition was to generate excitement among the target using free and earned media. While event marketing and Facebook seemed to be the obvious choice, our team pursued a different route in getting the target to experience the Honda CR-Z. The catch was that we only had $150 to generate as much publicity as possible. It was imperative that we create a convincing message that resonates with the target.
Honda provided a profile of the “Generation Y” demographics. They are single males and females between the ages of 18 and 35. They are in college or college educated, with a household income of $40K-$60K. That’s all well and good, but we need to understand their lifestyles as well.
Our biggest strength is that we are a part of Gen Y, and we understand how we and our peers think, feel and experience life.
It was easy for us to figure out how best to tell the story of the Honda CR-Z since we already speak "Gen Y". The brief for this campaign included psychographics for the target, and we have to admit that they were spot on.
- Gen Y is always connected
Whenever we travel, our biggest concern would be if we have access to power outlets and WIFI so that we can work on our laptops. We constantly feel the need to be connected to our friends and family and seek out the latest technologies that allow us to do so.
- Gen Y wants to save the environment without sacrificing style and performance in their vehicle choices.
If anyone tries to sell us products that are “environmentally friendly," we’d question their intentions. The whole Green movement comes off as patronising to us, sometimes we even question why we’d have to make all these sacrifices to save the earth when really our generation wasn’t the one that created this whole mess in the first place. We still have a passion for protecting the environment, it’s we just don’t think it has to come at the expense of our passion for enjoying life!
That’s why the CR-Z appeals to Gen Y - it lets us have the best of both worlds - we get to save the environment without compromising on fun things like speeding on a highway or cruising around the city with our friends.
- Gen Y wants driving to be about the journey too
When we first start driving, we're given our parent's old beat-up minivan. It was not fun-to-drive, it was not stylish and it was far from meeting our needs as a part of Generation Y. We wanted to stand out from the crowd, but not like a minivan does. With these cars, driving was never about the journey - we just wanted to get to the destination without getting teased or called a soccer mom.
The Honda CR-Z changes that. It had style and performance and makes us feel like we are in control. Driving was finally about the journey and we wanted to take our Generation Y peers on the journey with us through our campaign.
Everyone remembers his or her first car. Just as vividly, they remember the first car that they actually bought. Buying a car is an emotional experience. It’s not enough to just get the facts during these purchases. All of the marketing language can be overwhelming. You can tell me that the CR-Z is a sport-hybrid and a two-seater car with driver-centric controls. You can impress me with the expansive cargo area and intuitive technology, but that doesn’t really set the CR-Z apart. What I need are the emotional benefits that are attached to these features.
We need to connect on an emotional level with the car and its features in order to make this high involvement purchase. We want to see how the CR-Z can meet our lifestyle needs.
Since the CR-Z is the only Sport Hybrid out there – I know that it stands for innovation, and that I don’t have to feel guilty about taking the car over public transportation on my way to school or work. Because it’s a two-seater, I know that my passenger would be someone I have a special relationship with. It creates room for intimacy within the car. The driver centric controls and different driving modes make me feel like I’m always in control. And the expansive cargo area wouldn’t just be more room for my stuff, it represents the freedom to take off on a road trip with a friend.
We have demonstrated that trying to capture the attention of our consumers with merely a rational hard-sell of product benefits is difficult. But a brand with a message that inspires Gen Y’s hearts can move them into action. That’s why we decided to tap into the target audience’s life experiences for an insightful message for the Honda CR-Z.
Introducing, “CR-Z: You & Me.”
This is a tagline we have coined to serve as the overarching theme of all of our campaign efforts. We believe that it resonates very well with Gen Y’s psyche and speak to them on three levels.
First, the vehicle only has room for a driver and a passenger. Many of our target buyers are beyond their college days and may have moved off to a different city. They are independent but certainly still seeking some sort of companionship. When only two people are in a car together, it generally indicates a special relationship or friendship – something the target hopes to attain and maintain. Put two close friends or a couple in the car and any trip is bound to be fun. Especially so if it were a roadtrip, which has a strong appeal to Gen Y because of its connotations of freedom and bonding experiences between the two individuals. You & Me.
Then, the experience with and within the vehicle is a fantastic selling point. It is an indisputable human truth that we all treat our personal cars with as much care and love as if they were real people. The CR-Z has potential to become like someone very dear to us. We will take it to all our favorite places and really enjoy the rides thanks to its intuitive technology. We wouldn’t be afraid to flaunt the car on a night around town – its stylish appearance is something we can really be proud of. While these young drivers care about utility, they care much more about enjoying the ride and looking great while doing so. In this case, the CR-Z itself becomes the second part of the relationship. You & Me.
Finally, social media is the single greatest cultural phenomenon that Gen Y has collectively adopted as its own. In fact, we created it. A quick survey of the more successful social media platforms would reveal that most of their founders and developers are Gen Y: Facebook, Foursquare, even Twitter… This has to do with the fact that Gen Y prefers circulating their own information. We want to believe that we have specific interests and the information we put out should reflect that. We also want to network with people who share our interests to create a wealth of topical knowledge. That is why we prefer to spread information from one person to another, hence the whole premise of social media. This method of communication that is so unique to Gen Y and we developed our campaign around this knowledge. You & Me.
This strategic message also ties in nicely with the CR-Z’s existing advertising campaign tagline of “complete opposites in complete harmony.”
From there, we needed to figure out how to convey the message of You & Me in a way that would get us free, earned and social media.
We thought about our peers and what they like to do. We know they frequent the Internet and social media. They watch user generated content and TV. When they see something interesting or humorous, they want to share it with everyone. For example, when I see a funny video, I never hesitate to make my friends watch it with me or at least share the link with them.
Gen Y also really likes reality shows. Particularly those that feature dating and relationship issues. Because our target audience is single and we wanted to focus on bringing two individuals together, we decided to develop our own speed dating reality show around the Honda CR-Z.
Speed dating is a recent pop culture phenomenon. In essence, it is a matchmaking process where large groups of people would gather to meet each other in the hopes of finding someone else with similar interests. Typically, this is done in a casual setting such as a restaurant, and participants would go from table to table to talk to one another. This is popular with Gen Y because our generation doesn’t follow the traditional dating model. We like instant gratification, and things happen quickly these days. We have online dating sites, and we watch shows where people go from meeting to being engaged in the span of 10 episodes. For our campaign, we planned to put our own spin on the idea of speed dating and make it a reality show. The content coming out of this would both create publicity for the CR-Z and showcase its features.
We wanted a bachelor and a bachelorette, who would each go on four different dates. These main characters would be given the car and a route to drive with each date. The catch? The date lasts only as long as it takes to drive to the destination.
We decided to house our reality show and therefore the base of our campaign on YouTube (Channel Link: YouAndMeCRZ). When many people hear the phrase “social media,” it often implies Facebook or Twitter. Of course, these are mandatories in this day and age. However, YouTube and its new interactive features gave us an innovative opportunity to connect with our target and to actually go viral. Online videos can be passed on many ways, from emails to Facebook wall posts to someone watching over your shoulder in the computer lab or the office. We didn’t have to “beg” our friends to “like” or “follow” a page - this video series had legs of its own. The YouTube platform also makes for a great base for the social media campaign because it is a great destination for the other pages to link and anyone can discover it very easily.
In all, we produced 10 videos in the series - introductions to our suitors, Jen and John, and 4 dates for each of them. While many hours were spent editing after the filming, very little production was needed beforehand. The people in our videos were not actors, and the shows were not scripted. They were real people going on real dates. This ensured a genuine message from genuinely interesting people. In total, we produced almost an hour of original video content. The following is a highlight reel of particularly entertaining moments during the dates, accompanied by links to the youtube.com channels where you can view all of the videos:
Alongside the YouTube component, we created a Facebook fan page (Link to page) as an additional platform for our audiences to engage with us and stay updated on all of our upcoming events. It also facilitated our fan photo competitions. This was a two part initiative. The first one occurred on Halloween, when people were out in large numbers partaking in festivities (Link to page). The second one occurred before a football home game against our rivals, the University of Connecticut. This game had the highest expected turnout of the season (Link to page). We positioned the car in spots with high foot traffic in front of a large CR-Z: You & Me branded banner. Fans got the opportunity to check out the CR-Z and pose for a photo with it. After the photos were uploaded on our Facebook page, the people featured in the photo that got the most “likes” were awarded gift cards.
We also utilized Twitter as a means to broadcast our activities (Link to page). Later on, when we got media coverage, our share of voice on Twitter grew exponentially with retweets and mentions.
Quickly, over the span of just two weeks, the videos became viral. We stopped being the gatekeepers to our campaign - our viewers were making their own connections with each other. As more people passed the videos on to their friends and family through emails, word of mouth and social media, the number of views we got increased exponentially. By creating a “reality” show atmosphere, we facilitated real conversations with real people. Generation Y is not very open to traditional advertising messages. We facilitated positive product placement, which is good because audiences should subconsciously register the benefits of a product. If people talk about a product in a way that’s not believable, it is actually harmful to the brand. For example, on Burn Notice the use of the Hyundai Genesis is poor product placement because it made people mad that it was blatantly obvious, therefore insulting their intelligence. Gen Y is willing, however, to watch an entertaining show featuring people and places that they know, and then pass them on to their friends.
Another factor that bolstered the viral potential of our speed dating videos was the fact that we were relentless in our public relations efforts. We drafted a press release to send out to the media channels we wanted our campaign to be publicized on. But more importantly, and true to the spirit of our campaign message You & Me, we leveraged personal relationships with the media personnel. We researched the connections that we had within each medium, alumni or otherwise, then reached out to them personally.
We reached out to a variety of media outlets to reach the target in Syracuse and beyond. We reached out to the The Daily Orange because it is one of the top campus newspapers in the nation and is a morning staple of many SU students. As for the Syracuse Post Standard, it is the newspaper of the city of Syracuse and is the 10th best read by percent of DMA in the country. Our hope was, if we were covered by the Post-Standard, it would spread our message well beyond the campus area to all of Syracuse. We also reached out to the Newhouse School’s news department with hopes of getting press on the school’s webpage and social media profiles. Finally, we identified some key blogs we’d like to have cover us: Campus Basement is a satirical news site which has expanded to 5 New York colleges and is wildly popular among Syracuse undergrads. College Candy is a blog targeted to college women which primarily discusses dating and pop culture.
From the onset, various news outlets were interested in making public the fact that we had made it to the top ten of this competition. We maintained our networking efforts with them thereafter so that they were also interested in covering the success of the campaign as it progressed.
Once our videos became viral, more news channels wanted to tell our story, getting us the earned media coverage we desired. Since an important part of public relations campaigns is to measure their effectiveness in generating publicity around a cause, our next segment is dedicated to this purpose. We will look at the successes of our campaign through how well we met the original objectives set by Honda, the impressions generated, and its equivalent advertising value.
At the onset of this campaign, we did not fully understand where our social media impressions would actually come from. Our YouTube series exploded in popularity, more than doubling our projection for views. Originally disappointed with the number of fans and followers we thought we achieved on Facebook and Twitter respectively, we learned that we were still being shared and talked about beyond our own control and beyond our imaginations. This means that our campaign truly became viral because people were passing our videos on. This embodies the idea of "You & Me" because people were truly discussing the campaign amongst themselves.
The extensive print and online media coverage we achieved only helped in driving traffic to our social media pages and truly building excitement about this campaign in Syracuse. We were covered by all the aforementioned news sources that we reached out to. We were also approached by Citrus TV, the primary source of news on campus. Specifically, both Citrus TV News and Citrus TV Noticias, the English and Spanish news shows, inquired about our campaign separately. They asked for interviews about our campaign and our videos.
We met Honda’s primary and secondary campaign objectives. We raised awareness of the Honda CR-Z among the target buyer in many ways. People saw the car around campus, they took part in our photo events and they participated in our “speed” dating series. People watched the dates and voted for their favorite daters. They passed on the videos and talked about them on social media and in person.
Not only did the photo events and the “speed” dating series raise awareness, but they created buzz and excitement about the Honda CR-Z among the target buyer. People talked about the dating series. They encouraged their friends to watch it. Everything was passed on between you & me.
We raised Honda’s environmental image among the target audience by engaging in conversation with our photo event participants and passersby, many of whom wanted to know more about the hybrid features. Although unintended, the participants of our dating series talked about some of the hybrid features of the car, such as the engine turning off at a complete stop. Since these conversations were in the videos, all viewers were able to see the car in action and essentially experience its’ features for themselves.
We obtained coverage for the Honda CR-Z in traditional media outlets that reached the target audience. As you’ll see here, we achieved and exceeded our media goals that we laid out earlier.
We have prepared a video to summarize our campaign, its coverage and our overall results.
As this video just demonstrated, we were highly successful. Just to recap, On YouTube, we have now received over 8,200 total views. This just goes to show how viral our campaign really is. With YouTube, we can prove that we successfully reached our target. According to YouTube Insight, our impressions were almost equally split between males and females, and Generation Y-aged viewers were overwhelmingly the largest pool of viewers. Also, of the people who viewed our YouTube videos, one in four were watching multiple videos in the series at one time. As for Facebook, we had over 14,000 impressions, with nearly 85% of our impressions coming from those in the target age range.
Twitter also gave us nearly 5,000 total impressions through our use of it as a broadcast medium. Others also tweeted about our campaign and retweeted links to our news stories. Retweets and mentions of our activities created what we called “twimpressions” – impressions equal to the number of followers we couldn’t have reached otherwise. This is a unique PR opportunity exclusive to Twitter. Between these three forms of social media, there were over 25,000 impressions and the total value was worth more than $1900 in equivalent advertising.
As for media generated, between traditional and non-traditional media, there were more than 650,000 impressions. Overall, we achieved more than 681,000 impressions, with a total earned media value of more than $5000.
We believe that we’ve developed an effective 6 week campaign considering the small market and budget that we had to work with. We spent less than $150 and earned more than $5000 worth of media impressions. To put that into perspective, we generated impressions at a cost of about 22 cents per thousand. Not only is this pennies on the dollar compared to traditional media advertising, it also resonates effectively with the target.
Admittedly, Syracuse is not the largest media market in the world. Honda could make Speed Dating into an actual show, where episodes like ours could occur in cities across America or the world. The scaled campaign could achieve overwhelming value. If this became an actual reality show picked up by cable TV, we project that this campaign would be worth nearly $6.5 million dollars in equivalent media in one season. Our social media campaign achieved remarkable results considering it was housed in the Syracuse market. If extrapolated out to the rest of the country, we would have attained an additional 8 million impressions through social media alone.
Numbers and projections aside, we’ve created a campaign that truly resonates with Generation Y. We’ve discovered a way to create product-based entertainment without cheesy or fictional product placement, which the target can see right through. These consumers are living in social media similarly all over the world. Many of us are sharing the same life experiences, and we could connect with the You & Me campaign because of its’ online home and viral nature.
You & Me could extend to other, larger initiatives by Honda. “You & Me” could be the anchor for other social media and environmental initiatives. We’ve created a PR campaign which connects with a target that has been traditionally untouched by cold and boring car advertising. Honda can seize the opportunity to engage these consumers and make the CR-Z the car of Gen. Y.
