ford fiesta movement
USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO LAUNCH FORD’S GLOBAL CAR IN THE U.S.A.
Fiesta Movement
In April 2009, The Ford Motor Company launched a new marketing campaign called the Ford Fiesta Movement. The campaign had an unusual approach, never previously used before by Ford since being incorporated in June 1903: Ford used amateurs to create ads for Ford Fiesta, their new B category car and relied on (an artificially designed) Word of Mouth Marketing that used online social media to build awareness. Their thinking was unusual in two ways: Today, it’s a familiar case to everyone to use blogs and social media to engage buyers, but in 2009 letting consumers take over your brand was unheard of. Plus, Ford decided to create a campaign for a product that was not on sale and would not be sold for another 12 months from the start of the campaign (‘atypical timeline’ –Exhibit E). Two months into the campaign the marketing team responsible for the effort had to evaluate the campaign’s performance and possible next steps.
There are two key questions:
How do you evaluate a marketing campaign’s performance for a specific product, when in reality you haven’t sold anything?
What should Ford do after the campaign to leverage the newly build brand awareness and convert interest into sales?
Measuring Campaign Efficiency – Will we make enough profit at the end?
1) Calculate expectation: There are very few hints in the case study that allows the reader understand how would Ford measure success:
Ford targeted 9% market-share from the total amount of new passengers in the B category, a segment that consisted of 437,000 passengers – that works out to an expected 39,330 cars sold
At the start of the campaign Ford expected a 100.000 test drives within the 12 months
Calculating with Ford’s expectation of market share, it sounds like Ford expected to sell 39.330 cars out of the 100.000 expected test drives, which tells us that every test drive, in Ford’s mind has a 39% conversion rate.
Fiesta Movement
In April 2009, The Ford Motor Company launched a new marketing campaign called the Ford Fiesta Movement. The campaign had an unusual approach, never previously used before by Ford since being incorporated in June 1903: Ford used amateurs to create ads for Ford Fiesta, their new B category car and relied on (an artificially designed) Word of Mouth Marketing that used online social media to build awareness. Their thinking was unusual in two ways: Today, it’s a familiar case to everyone to use blogs and social media to engage buyers, but in 2009 letting consumers take over your brand was unheard of. Plus, Ford decided to create a campaign for a product that was not on sale and would not be sold for another 12 months from the start of the campaign (‘atypical timeline’ –Exhibit E). Two months into the campaign the marketing team responsible for the effort had to evaluate the campaign’s performance and possible next steps.
There are two key questions:
How do you evaluate a marketing campaign’s performance for a specific product, when in reality you haven’t sold anything?
What should Ford do after the campaign to leverage the newly build brand awareness and convert interest into sales?
Measuring Campaign Efficiency – Will we make enough profit at the end?
1) Calculate expectation: There are very few hints in the case study that allows the reader understand how would Ford measure success:
Ford targeted 9% market-share from the total amount of new passengers in the B category, a segment that consisted of 437,000 passengers – that works out to an expected 39,330 cars sold
At the start of the campaign Ford expected a 100.000 test drives within the 12 months
Calculating with Ford’s expectation of market share, it sounds like Ford expected to sell 39.330 cars out of the 100.000 expected test drives, which tells us that every test drive, in Ford’s mind has a 39% conversion rate.