Ford and social networking
There’s an interesting article – How Ford Got Social Marketing Right - on the Harvard Business Review blog, by Grant McCracken. In it, he talks about Ford have used social networking in an innovative and successful way to market the Fiesta model.
Ford did not approach early adopters to generate interest, but what he calls culture creators – people who create content on sites like YouTube. One hundred of them were given a car and encouraged to create content by being set challenges which they could then document.
How successful was this?
Fiesta got 6.5 million YouTube views and 50,000 requests for information about the car — virtually none from people who already had a Ford in the garage. Ford sold 10,000 units in the first six days of sales. The results came at a relatively small cost. The Fiesta Movement is reputed to have cost a small fraction of the typical national TV campaign.
McCracken outlines a three-step process for success:
- Engage culturally creative consumers to create content.
- Encourage them to distribute this content on social networks and digital markets in the form of a digital currency.
- Craft this is a way that it rebounds to the credit of the brand, turning digital currency (and narrative meaning) into a value for the brand.
Overall, a very good article, well worth a read.
