It was a movement in the sense that we had enough scale. We had one hundred agents with one hundred Fiestas as we rolled towards the introduction date. It felt special to the agents because they were driving a car that wasn’t commercially available. There was a limited amount of time for this vehicle to be new and novel and the agents could use that novelty to connect with their friends in a surprising way.
It was also a movement because it changed a lot of people’s minds both inside and outside the company. It really demonstrated for the first time at Ford, at least in the US, that if you take a little money and execute the promotion of the Fiesta online a year before launch, that little investment could be the same as ten times as much as traditional, fixed marketing on television.
That’s been a paradigm shift as we now think about going global with our products. Fiesta was initially a regional launch: We launched it first in Europe, then in Asia, then finally in the US almost two years later. But with Focus, we’re now launching it simultaneously across Europe and the US with the exact same product. We fundamentally changed our thinking on how we executed that launch.
When you say “a little money,” what kind of money are you talking about?
I don’t want to give you the exact dollars, but on Fiesta we started a year early and for ten percent of what a normal, fixed-marketing spend would be, we created 60 percent unaided nameplate awareness.
That was higher than Fit and Yaris, the best competitors in the segment. Previously, we had zero unaided awareness. Going from zero to 60 percent unaided awareness, at ten cents on the dollar, was a watershed moment for us as marketers at Ford.
Do you see applicability of the Fiesta approach to other Ford models?
I see applicability pretty much to every Ford model. Even with regional products like the Explorer — we picked one day this summer in July and we launched it on Facebook. We didn’t launch the Explorer at an auto show. I’m sure the auto-show organizers weren’t particularly excited about that, but it was much more effective. By combining earned and paid media, and picking a date and launching it on Facebook, we got much broader coverage.
That’s another example of how we institutionalized the use of social media in the pre-launch activity of all of our products, global or regional. The Focus is really cool because we’re now going to get a hundred customers from Western Europe and the US and they are going to drive this vehicle before it’s even on sale.
They are now applying for a chance to take them and a friend to Southern Europe to test-drive the vehicle before it comes out and we’re going to donate a lot of money to their charity of choice. We’re not paying them for their time, but we’ll help a cause that they care about.
You can imagine — we’re going to be somewhere in Southern Europe, we’re going to have a bunch of Focuses and we’re going to have people from Spain, Russia, Ohio and California. They are going to be figuring out the language, they’re all going to have their flip-phones and they are all going to be documenting that first drive.
Some of them will make videos and others will do sophisticated skits — who knows what they’re going to do? And they are going to launch the vehicle for us.
Will there be a wear-out factor with social media?
No, although I do think that how you market effectively will evolve very quickly online.
When we started the Fiesta movement, we had no idea where it would take us. I would never have guessed that we would have had almost all of the hundred agents on the floor of the LA auto show to reveal the vehicle for us — not some company executives, but the Fiesta agents. They quickly became part of the DNA of the vehicle’s launch and they were literally everywhere we showed that vehicle.
I guarantee you that the global test-drive we’re doing with Focus will be the same. I cannot tell you in six months what we’ll be doing with these agent partners of ours, but I know they are going to be helping us launch the Focus globally. What I’ve learned — and what Ford has learned — is that your tactics are going to have to evolve quickly because everyone’s experience online is evolving quickly. The novelty of social media will wear out only if you become stale and begin to think that one-size-fits-all.
The average age of a Fiesta buyer is about 45, which seems a little old.
Actually, not necessarily. I learned a lot when I was at Scion, which was intended only for young people. This is what I learned: The average age of the youngest car owners is low 30s. The reason is because almost all cars, especially affordable ones, have bi-modal distribution of age — there are a lot of young people and a lot of empty-nest couples buying them.
So, there is really no one who is 45 years old who buys the Fiesta; there are people in their 20s and 30s and there are people in their 50s and 60s. The key is, who do you want to turn on? Who do you need to work hardest to get to your showroom to test drive that vehicle?
We targeted our marketing not at the consumption target because the consumption target would be both of those populations. We targeted our marketing to the group that was the most unlikely to consider Ford because they didn’t know about the Fiesta. They don’t actually come into our showrooms, so that’s where we spent the money.
Are there any unforeseen opportunities for innovation with social media?
Boy, that’s a big one. I see convergence of the access point. The digital experience is now more and more living on a smart-phone than in your bunny slippers in your house.
I can’t predict exactly how it’s going to manifest itself, but I know that we’re going to have customers who want more information about their neighborhood and they are going to be asking Sync (see sidebar) to tell them about that.
Let’s say you’re driving a car and you want to have dinner somewhere. Through voice command, you’re able to ask your friends on Facebook, who live in your neighborhood, to give you advice on where to go. Once you find that out, you can use your Sync system to find out what’s on the menu and make a reservation. That could all happen literally in 30 seconds.
What does it say about innovation when a $395 option like Sync sells so many cars?
Well, as a traditional car guy, who owns a hot-rod and stuff like that, it’s a little scary! My dream in coming to a car company was to walk into the design dome and talk to the engineers. But now what’s really cool about our cars is the technology that’s going in them.
It’s also the fact that they look great and drive great, but frankly, coming from Toyota to Ford, I was shocked to see this Sync-equipped vehicle was turning faster than a non-Sync-equipped vehicle. In fact, when we asked customers, many of them said they wouldn’t consider Ford if it didn’t have Sync. So, literally, they were buying the brand because of Sync.
That just showed me that you can never take your edge on technology for granted anymore in cars. As someone very famous at Apple said: “The interiors of cars stink.” As the interior experience catches up to personal electronics that cost a couple hundred bucks, we’ll never be able to go back. How we execute technology in the vehicle will be just as important as how fun it drives and what kind of gas mileage it has.
We can’t take it for granted just because little old Ford did the deal with Microsoft, which most of the industry fluffed off. Our competitors were hiring hundreds of thousands of people for call centers and putting up satellites but we came up with this idea with no satellites and no call center. We provided more utility to customers and allowed them to bring all of their cool content into the car and use it. But if we don’t stay fresh, our competitors are going to do something like that to us.
So, there’s relatively more opportunity for innovation in the interior experience?
More and more. That’s why Ford is taking the lead in what we call “the smart pillar.” When you look back in five years, the bet that Ford is making is that we will be different as a company because of our technology pillar, and that extends into the marketing.
Derrick Kuzak, Ford’s head of engineering, says that we will take the lead in in-car technology, and that the way you interface with the cars is going to have to live up to an Apple-like experience. If Derrick Kuzak is going to bet on that as an engineer, then as a marketer I have to lean into social media to market the car, as well.
Where is the innovation in the car-buying experience?
I think it’s everywhere. There are big and little things we can do. You know when you go into the supermarket and they have those things on the floor where you can learn about products as you go up to the shelf? Well, we took that idea and put an internet tag on it.
So, in the dealership, when you walk up to the Fiesta and there’s no salesperson there, and you want to know how the PowerShift transmission works, you can take your smartphone and put it up against the tag on the floor. It will pull down from the web a Fiesta agent’s video of how the transmission works. That cost us nothing.
It’s a small thing that you can bring online video assets right into the showroom. You don’t have to have the super plasma screen at $5,000 where you have to load in DVDs every month because the content changes. You can actually use customer’s phones to do that. Or salesmen can take their iPhone and demonstrate the car using our online videos right there in the showroom. That’s a little thing.
In terms of bigger things: When I was at Lexus, I asked our service people how long it took to deliver an LS460 to a customer. They said, well, Jim, if we explained all the features quickly, it would take six to seven hours. I realized that probably was not going to work for our average customer, who was like 60 years old.
I had this epiphany as I was driving home one day. I saw this Geek Squad Beetle, and I’m thinking: How could Best Buy help customers with technology in their home or work — or wherever the heck they want — for something that cost a couple hundred bucks and we can’t explain a $100,000 car to a customer because they get impatient after an hour and want to go home?
So, the key innovation in the future is not going to be just a buying experience. I want a Geek Squad type of delivery, where someone comes to their house and explains how MyFord Touch Sync version 6 works, because they have version 2. I think that is not too far off in the distance for our industry.
Your slogan, Drive One, doesn’t seem to have a lot of poetry at first glance.
Right. You’re so right. Isn’t that funny?
But then when you think about it there are so many levels to it.
Yeah, it’s so cool you brought that up because it reminds me of meeting Alan Mulally in Los Angeles when he was talking to me about joining the team. He showed me his four-point plan and I had the same reaction you did. Of course we should make vehicles that people want. He’s like, well, does Ford? No. Well, then, what would we have to do to really make that come alive?
You start peeling the onion and this four-point plan that looks very simple on the surface wound up being the scariest and the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I left my comfortable life at Lexus to join the team and I think Drive One is the same thing. We needed something that could carry us forward.
When we got here, a lot of people on the coasts were apathetic about the brand. They thought of Ford as a social institution: They were like, God, I hope that company survives, but I’ll never buy one of their cars. They separated the cool history from the cars themselves, so we knew that the first challenge was just to invite people to drive one of our cars.
We knew that if we were successful at that, we then had to give those customers who drove one and then showed up with a Fusion and all their neighbors with their Hondas, Accords and Camrys are, like, why did you buy a Fusion? She could say she drives it because the DNA of a Ford is that they are fun to drive.
Maybe Drive One meant that I was part of a club — part of this cool, “get-it” company. So, literally, we need something that maybe wasn’t poetic, maybe wasn’t cool, maybe didn’t grab you by the throat, but that was flexible and authentic enough that could move with us as we moved the brand forward.
What is it about a car that says that it’s a Ford?
What an awesome question — no one has ever asked me that! That is such a cool question. What makes a Ford a Ford is that we don’t make appliances. We don’t make refrigerators. Most people want to get from point A to point B without any disruption. But what makes a Ford a Ford is that it democratizes emotion. It’s fun to drive and has technology like no other brand.
Our DNA since Henry Ford started this company is to democratize things that people couldn’t get before. In today’s world, that’s fun-to-drive, fuel-efficient, global-standard quality, with in-car technology that no one else has. That’s Derrick Kuzak’s vision for our products and I have fully bought in to that vision.
What do you think Henry Ford would make of the company today?
I think he’d be really proud of Sync. He would say Sync is definitely a proof point of how the company is different. He would be really proud of our soy-foam seats and our hybrids. He’d be really proud of our advanced powertrain.
But I think Henry Ford would also say to us that it’s about time we turned the company into a global enterprise. And then he would probably tell us to get out of the office more often.
The journey that Ford has been on for the last several years is one of good old American ingenuity. We don’t make commodity products and we are not trying to be something that we are not. We have enlightened leadership and functional experts who can create value. We have word-of-mouth. I think that’s a template for any comeback.
