Making a small investment for a big gain, rewarding car owners for good deeds becomes the new marketing secret for car companies?

The brand will give cash rewards or new cars to car owners who are brave or do good deeds. In the end, the car owners get real rewards and the car companies also gain reputation. This is a new marketing attempt by car companies. What do you think of this new marketing method?

At about 2:10 a.m. on May 1, a landslide occurred on a section of Meida Expressway in Meizhou City, Guangdong Province. After discovering the abnormality of the road, truck driver Wang Xiangnan and his wife, who were passing through the section, stopped their van horizontally in the middle of the expressway, turned on the double flashes, and intercepted the vehicles behind them, preventing more vehicles from falling into the "dead end road".

After learning about this, FAW Jiefang, the truck brand driven by Wang Xiangnan and his wife, immediately worked with the China Workers Development Foundation to award Wang Xiangnan a positive energy bonus of 10,000 yuan on May 5, four days later. While netizens praised Wang Xiangnan and his wife for their bravery, FAW Jiefang also gained a large amount of traffic and support by issuing incentive bonuses.

Undoubtedly, Wang Xiangnan and his wife deserve praise and commendation for their courageous act. From the perspective of "a gentleman is judged by his deeds, not his heart", FAW Jiefang's reward to the car owner is also a real act of supporting justice. However, from the perspective of the behavior logic of the car company, what we see is the same script and story.

1. Incentive bonuses and new car distribution: the new traffic code of car companies

Friends who often surf the Internet should still have an impression of it.

On February 25, a video of a "Bentley driver assaulting and injuring people" went viral on the Internet. In the video, a BYD Han owner stopped to mediate a fight, which won praise from many netizens. In the afternoon of the same day, Li Yunfei, general manager of BYD Group's brand and public relations department, said on Weibo that BYD decided to provide free lifetime maintenance for Mr. Sun's vehicle and reward him with 200,000 yuan. At the same time, BYD is considering setting up a "BYD Owner Positive Energy and Bravery Award" to reward owners with positive energy and bravery with 50,000 to 200,000 yuan. For a time, #BYD rewards 200,000 yuan for car owners who mediate a fight# became the number one hot topic on Weibo.

"BYD has a vision", "Well done to BYD, it is responsible and accountable" ... This statement-like Weibo post by BYD eventually received over 1,700 comments and 30,000 likes. It is worth noting that the number of comments on other commercial advertising tweets by the account owner hovered around 100, and the number of likes did not exceed 1,000.

Coincidentally, on March 19, a video of a woman in Taizhou, Zhejiang accidentally drove her car onto the curb to give way to an ambulance was trending on Weibo. In addition to praising the woman's good deeds, netizens also commented on the mini car Leapmotor T03, which looked like a "chopped pepper fish head", "stranded chopped pepper fish head", "unknown driving skills, but kindness is the main theme", and other humorous quotes. Leapmotor followed up on the incident and announced that it would search for the female owner online and provide comprehensive inspections and lifetime free maintenance for her vehicle. At the same time, in order to reward the owner's behavior, it gave the owner a newly launched Leapmotor C10. As of press time, the topic has been read 1.924 million times on Weibo.

In fact, if we sort out the logic behind them, we can see that the development trends of the two incidents cannot be said to be unrelated, but they can be said to be exactly the same, which can be summarized as "the car owner acted bravely or did good deeds + media reports + the brand searched for the person on the entire network + the brand gave the car owner cash rewards or gave him a new car, and ultimately the car company gained a good reputation and the car owner received real rewards."

Using the search engine to search for news stories similar to the above story between 2013 and 2023, most of the rewards for positive deeds come from the government or state-owned enterprises, and almost no car companies' actions can be found. 2024 is not even halfway through, but it has been on the hot search list one after another. Has there never been other BYD car owners who have bravely done good deeds before 2024? Obviously, this is a new attempt by the car company to market .

2. The plot takes a turn. Does the team you stand on necessarily make the right choice?

But using the positive energy of public welfare to write articles is not a sure-fire way to succeed.

On January 29, a blogger posted a video saying that a Mercedes-Benz cut him off while he was on a self-driving tour. The video showed that the man in the Mercedes-Benz got out of the car to stop the blogger's car and punched the other's hood. However, the blogger was a grandmother over 70 years old, and for a time, the owner of the Mercedes-Benz was pushed to the forefront. Chery, the brand of the Tiggo 8 driven by the blogger, promptly received this huge wave of traffic. Without any verification, it sent people to express condolences, provided free repair services, and also provided a new Tiggo 9 as a vehicle for the blogger's grandmother.

However, as the situation developed, Chery failed to ride on the popularity and was instead hit back by the traffic, which was somewhat like "trying to draw a tiger but end up drawing a dog".

Soon, complete video recordings from the dashcam of the Mercedes-Benz car involved and the ticket office surveillance were released one after another. Netizens discovered that the video posted by the blogger had been edited later, and the experience posted by the blogger was suspected of tampering with the facts. Chery, which had previously supported the car owner, was also put on the cusp of the storm. The dented hood caused by a punch caused netizens to question the product quality. Even the whole incident was speculated to be a marketing farce directed and acted by Chery Automobile.

From the perspective of marketing means, there was no obvious error in the direction of Chery's motivation and specific operations. "Older car owners were bullied by road rage, and the brand supported them." If everything went well, this would be a perfect brand public relations. However, Chery's only mistake was that it was too eager to follow the traffic, so that it started a series of subsequent operations without verifying the facts. The bullet fired at the beginning of the incident hit itself right between the eyebrows at the end of the incident.

3. A gentleman judges by deeds as well as heart. What is the car companies planning?

Today’s car marketing has shifted from product strength to story and brand image. Just as people think of elites and high-level intellectuals when they mention Volvo, and think of Huawei as the pride of domestic products, domestic car brands, due to their late start, cannot tell the stories they tell investors to consumers, nor do they have decades or even hundreds of years of history to build their brand image.

The question is, how to quickly improve brand power?

In the Internet age, blunt advertising and marketing promotions will only cause consumers to rebel and face the risk of failure. Toyota once had the stone lions at Marco Polo Bridge salute its new car, which triggered anti-Japanese sentiment among consumers. In the end, it had to change the name of the new car from the catchy "霸道" to the unpopular "普罗".

Later, Zhiji’s new car launch conference talked a lot about how engineers missed the birth of their own flesh and blood in order to meet the deadline. It was praised as "Every time Zhiji is produced, a child loses his father" and "Zhiji’s windshield wipers spray not windshield washer fluid, but children’s tears."

Time and again, past experiences have made car companies realize that any careless marketing move could ruin the brand’s goodwill in the minds of consumers.

Is there any marketing method that does not seem deliberate, can still attract traffic, and will not backfire? This is a multiple-choice question, and "motivating positive energy car owners" is one of the correct answers.

On the one hand, car owners who do good deeds have a natural ability to attract traffic. Once the FAW Jiefang truck owner's brave act was exposed, it was immediately reported by top official media such as People's Daily and CCTV News, which in turn triggered many media reposts. The car brand driven by the car owner who did good deeds will also be used as one of the identity labels of the reported object and will be widely disseminated along with the press release. By giving encouragement and rewards to car owners and promoting the positive deeds of car owners, car companies can gain good exposure in a very short time.

At the same time, the distribution of car owners' gender, age, occupation and behavior also affects the brand image of car companies. Just as people see that the most frequently used destination for Cadillac navigation in AutoNavi is a bath center, so Cadillac still carries the title of "Bath Emperor". When a car owner's good deeds are infinitely magnified, they will rise to the image of the brand user group. The BYD Han owner in the "Bentley owner beating people" incident is a professional lawyer. The exposure of his identity as a lawyer helps improve the outside world's stereotype of BYD, and it is also in line with BYD's current marketing direction of impacting high-end.

On the other hand, whether it is cash rewards or giving away new cars, it is a sure-win business for car companies. According to data released by Guancha.com, BYD's marketing and management expenses in 2022 have reached 25.07 billion yuan. The volume brought by the 200,000 cash reward has far exceeded its own value. The same is true for Leapmotor. The marketing and management expenses in 2022 reached 1.96 billion yuan. Even if the C10 top-end model is given away, it only costs 165,800 yuan. Using the price of a car in exchange for online reviews of "having a pattern" and "having a sense of social responsibility" can be called "huge profits."

However, motivating positive car owners is not an ironclad magic weapon. The internal motivations of the car owners' personal behavior may be unknown to anyone except themselves, and the truth behind the news events will continue to be unearthed and changed as the situation develops. Cash and new car rewards can indeed bring attractive marketing results in the short term, but once the plot is reversed, it will have to bear the backlash of traffic.

The marketing of car companies is always undergoing evaluation and exploration through continuous trial and error. No matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat.

Author: yihao chen

Source: WeChat public account: Morketing (ID: Morketing)