Ford and Swap Your Ride

I’ve seen a couple of Ford Commercials over the weekend, part of their Swap Your Ride promotion and just wanted to scream.  They have a tag line of  ‘No Scripts or Prompts. Just Real People.  Telling Real Stories.’ but forgot to apply it to themselves when rolling out the campaign.

What they are doing is nothing new – give one of your products to a customer/potential customer, let them use it for a while and get some feedback.  Microsoft has done it, Toshiba have done it, I use a Palm Treo 680 that is on loan from the company (yes, I love it, well, most of it).   But usually you know you are getting something free from the company.  But Ford and their agency (which was JWT – a previous employer) have decided in this case to keep their involvement in secret until after the test, after filming the testimonials. Although according to the NYT, some people were not aware that Ford were behind it even the weekend before the ads aired – "where participants were still not aware over the weekend that the Fords they were driving were part of a marketing project."  Sentient Services quotes from the WSJ:

"Reached yesterday, Mr. Campos [one of the participants] was surprised to learn In-Home Test Drive Experience isn’t a real company and was linked to Ford. ‘I had no idea,’ he said. He added it doesn’t change his high opinion of the Focus, but that it would be better for the company to be ‘more straight-forward.’ "

The WSJ calls this an "aggressive marketing tactic" and seems to suggest that Ford has no choice, as the quality perception of American cars is so low among buyers of foreign (especially Japanese) cars that it’s virtually impossible to get past that perceptual screen and get people to really "see" the cars and the quality improvements that have been made over the years.

 According to Walter Carl, this may not be strictly illegal nor against WOMMA guidelines,

So, let’s think about if anyone got hurt here. The drivers are getting to drive around in a new car for a week and show it off to their friends which juices their sense of being special. There could be a feeling of being "duped" and there may have been some backlash. And this may have had the effect of undermining credibility in marketing activities or making it that much more difficult for real market researchers to do their work (see the Market Research Society’s Code of Conduct for interesting thoughts on this; of course the people doing the commercial aren’t actually market researchers so they wouldn’t be bound by such guidelines).

But I’m with Toby Bloomberg on this – what were they thinking?

Is this stealth marketing? Is it astrotrufing? Sounds like gray marketing at the very least to me. Not to mention that I feel it discredits the marketing research industry.

I can think of 2 reasons why they would hide the fact that the team came from Ford:

• the mental perception of Ford is so negative that the testers would be biased before they started the test and only produce negative comments.  But they are still driving a Ford car, if they think that having Ford doing the research produces negative feelings then pulling a trick like this is not going to help and will probably make the perception worse.
• that people will only tell researchers good things if they are from the company and they are going to get biased positive results.  I’m not sure the positive bias from talking to the company is going to have a larger impact than getting a free car to try for the week, which is going to produce a need to reply positively anyway.

I think neither of these reasons are valid for making the choice they did.  Both reasons seemed to play a part in the decision as they say they needed a trick to get unbiased reviews.    I’d love to see follow up research to see if the disclaimer in the ads leaves positive or negative perceptions with the ad viewers.  It’s definitely made my perception of the company worse.  No impact on my perception of the cars – I had a neutral view anyway.

One further question I would have is about negative reviews.  The commercial and website only show positives – can there really have been no negative feedback whatsoever?  Let’s see that and more importantly, lets see what they are doing about it.  A real indicator of a company that wants to turn around is they listen to criticism and they address it.  The call to show negative reviews is a common one on many of the car forums where they are talking about the campaign.

There’s a good run down of the total campaign from automotive.com.  It’s going to have 28 TV ads, print executions, radio ads, digital advertising, the aforementioned website and special in-dealership deals such as $1000 dollars cash bonus for swapping.  A pretty comprehensive campaign, hitting all channels.  Taking a look at the coverage, it seems that the car blogs tend to just repost the press release, the marketing blogs are challenging the premise of the deception and the car forums are tending to say they would not swap.