Sales Drivers Wanted

I'm a week late to this but it's fairly big news and I hadn't noticed anyone else talking about it: Volkswagen is doing a big U-turn in their North American marketing.  Over at Adliterate, Richard had hosted some debate a few months back celebrating the campaigns VW and CP+B had been doing, and wondering what the sales effects might be.  Well, it seems we have an answer, and it's mixed.

AdAge ran a cover story last week that despite the extremely positive press and word-of-mouth around the campaigns, VW is about to completely change direction.  They've also fired the senior client who had hired Crispin and oversaw the recent work.  And they're looking to go back to an umbrella campaign, with a "Drivers Wanted"-esque tagline (the recent work had distinct campaigns for the Jetta, Passat, GTI, and Rabbit, abandoning any unifying VW-ness other than perhaps a smart attitude).  Now people are openly questioning whether CP+B will be able to keep the business.

So is it a case of some fresh, different creative that just didn't move product?  It turns out it's not that simple.  And this is where it gets interesting.  According to AdAge, the ads did work, up to a point.  In 2005, previous to the new work, VW of America had posted a big loss. In 2006, VW posted 5% growth, generated showroom traffic, and increased purchase consideration.  Turning around a loss, re-energizing a brand, getting on shopping lists, and posting decent growth in year one of a new campaign sounds pretty good to me.  And AdAge reports that the target for growth was 5-10%, so they did meet their target, albeit the low end.  But here's the kicker: AdAge quotes from internal sources that "VW had actually hoped to increase sales something like 30%."  And that's where it starts to smell fishy.

A lofty goal for growth like that, coming off of several years of decline, and in a category with a long purchase cycle, sounds more like crazy wishful thinking than anything else.  And if the stated goal was 5-10%, then having another hidden goal, especially an unrealistic one, just isn't fair to anyone.  So are they changing campaigns just based on that?  To be honest it sounds like the advertising has been doing its job.  It's not that I'm a Crispin apologist - after all, they've done their share of crap work, and are being lambasted for their creepy new Orville Redenbacher work (full disclosure - ConAgra, and Orville, are also a client of ours).  But from what's being reported, it sounds like CP+B shouldn't take the fall for VW, unless there's more to the story than it would seem.

VW logo art by Stepan Gencey

Comments

[richard]

Thanks for that update Jason.

Does sound fishy - if I were VW I would be happy just to have turned consideration in that market around. expectations of 30% growth in sales seems extraordinary.

CP+B had really nailed VW I felt and were building strategies and doing work that had a real chance of breaking through.

[Cameron]

It's funny that this post comes on the same day that Adage is reporting the end of CP+B's "Man Law" campaign for Miller (http://adage.com/article?article_id=114469), a campaign that generated buzz but not sales.

In a way this VW situation doesn't seem fair, but it's understandable in a way. The VW holy safe/unpimp campaigns got a lot of people talking, and I'm sure this raised VW's expectations. But as it turns out it only achieved a moderate increase in sales. Lots of buzz, not so much sales.

A famous advertising guru came to my class once and told us all that the top priority of advertising should be to get people talking. Well, the Exxon Valdez got people talking about oil companies -- it didn't help sales.

[mark]

Word on the street is that, whatever the sales results, the dealers hated the work and Kerri Martin. Rule #1 in the car biz: never think you are actually working for the car manufacturer or the consumer.