Nissan: ‘Car brands trail other sectors in digital marketing’
- Marketing Week UK
Automotive brands are falling behind other sectors in digital and social marketing because they are clinging on to the traditional model of using print and TV ads to sell cars through dealerships, according to one of Nissan’s top digital marketers.
Nissan is currently in the second phase of its #Jukeride social campaign, which turned to its community of motorsport fans to help crowdsource the design for a Nissan Juke race car, in an effort to improve the way it uses social and digital media in its marketing.
Speaking to Marketing Week about the development of the #Jukeride campaign, David Parkinson, EMEA and India general manager of social media and digital engagement, said the “democratisation of everything through social and digital is something brands can’t ignore”.
“You shouldn’t underestimate the community. Even though we are the expert engineers, there are great ideas that we wouldn’t think of because we’re too close to it and some ideas could only come from the Playstation generation,” he says.
Car brands’ progress in using digital and social marketing is behind that of sports brands like Nike and Adidas or FMCG brands such as Starbucks, who are “getting there quicker” because they are being more innovative and doing more “test and learn” activity, according to Parkinson.
He cites Ford’s Fiesta Movement social campaign in 2009 as an example of the “first, biggest and last good” social campaign in the automotive sector.The automotive industry’s reticence to fully adopt digital marketing is through fear of moving beyond the traditional, and still successful, model, says Parkinson.
Parkinson says Nissan’s digital activity is there to supplement the traditional TV and print activity but he believes eventually there will be a tipping point where car brands rely more on digital and social than traditional TV ads.
“That basic [dealership] model works and it sells cars so [marketers] are afraid to mess with that model, but we’re trying to look to the future. The triple screening and media stacking people do is changing the way people consume media. That’s why we’re still doing traditional but we’re doing social in parallel. Eventually there will be slightly less traditional and more social. If you look at Nike, they do very little traditional and nearly all social.”
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