A company that has recently performed several good marketing campaigns is Chevrolet, a now successful car brand that recently under the umbrella of General Motors emerged from bankruptcy in 2009. Chevrolet has employed several advertising campaigns that have resulted in significant success, putting the company at the top in terms of the number of car sales in the US.
Products like the Chevrolet Cruze have been the top seller for five months straight and the new Volt has raised hopes for the future. What they both have in common is that they have raised the profits for the company.
In fact, the Chevy Cruze which replaced the Cobalt, has sold 88% better than the Cobalt for the same period last year. This is due to that overall quality and that the prices have improved significantly compared to Chevrolet’s rival like Ford and Toyota, while their marketing campaigns have only highlighted those facts. According to analysts the new design and the technologically advanced car are the key selling features. Bob Lutz, a former product manager, had this to say: "Cruze’s interior and exterior design is more advanced than competitors in the same market segment.” The slightly larger size of the Cruze compared to its competitors makes the difference as well as the high MPG rate and the new interior.
Although the product has improved significantly, one should not discount the marketing effort that allowed the potential customers to find the company in the first place. Because if there would not have been a marketing effort people would have been uniformed of the superior offering that Chevrolet provides in the form of the Chevy Cruze and the Volt. Their excellent marketing campaigns got their word out to the consumers about their product and that translated into higher sales for the Cruz and now the Volt.
One unified theme in Chevy’s ads is the perceived “humanity” of the brand. Many of its ads follow Chevrolet owner’s through their daily lives. There are Chevrolet commercials that go with them when they are apartment hunting to no avail, when they go to the gas station or when some friends go on a road trip across the US. They all portray an image of the individual; being human, patriotic or caring. This also reflected in the product being priced 1000 dollars less or having a higher MPG rate than its nearest competitor, the Ford Elantra. All of these factors show that Chevrolet and its cars somehow care about the person that drives the car.
Another common theme in Chevy ads is that they are produced in the same style because they all have the same lighting and feel to them. Plus, always when a Chevy ad ends it ends with a white screen and Chevrolet’s logo, the golden cross and with their slogan “Chevy Runs Deep.” These elements put together, create a common theme or signature that is specific to Chevrolet so whenever you see a Chevy ad you instantly know that it is a Chevy ad and you in a sense know what is coming.
One ad that is particularly clever is Chevy’s new ad regarding the Volt. In that ad a car pulls up to a gas station, the owner gets out and he is just about to go into the gas station to go to the bathroom when a nosy, know it all, kid comes up to him and confronts him. He says: “I thought that it was an electric car. What are you doing at the gas station?” The owner corrects him and says that it is a hybrid, so it does need gas sometime but not at this time. The kid keeps firing questions at him and he gets more and more annoyed with the situation until finally the kids father comes out and start over with the same questions.
The ads itself is very funny but what you might not notice is that the ad it is also informative at the same time. Because the owner in an attempt to respond to the questions that are fired at him explains important facts about the Chevy Volt that a potential customer might want to know. This ad is just one example of the many successful ads that Chevrolet has created, and although we might not notice it at first, the ads might place itself subliminally in the back of our mind and then hopefully create a positive imagine of the brand that makes us want to buy a car after that after we have seen that commercial. This process is called evoked set which is a set of brands that come to mind from a specific product category when we think about buying such a product. The brand that we end up buying is most likely one of the brands we think of first as part of our evoked set and that is where good advertising can help.
