Social Media Campaign Analysis-Ford Fiesta
This case is based on the social media campaign in 2011
Executive summary
Ford Fiesta, which wishes to overturn its traditional brand image, is launching a social media campaign by handing over the car to 100 socially vibrant agents for the ultimate 6 months test drive experience. With all expenses paid to use, the agents would be asked to complete different missions and use social media to share their experience with friends and followers. The campaign has a huge social impact across different social media platforms and definitely increases brand awareness. However, whether the social media campaign is really effective at changing the brand perceptions and at the same time converting brand awareness to sales is still a question to be considered for future market practice.
Industry analysis
The Ford Company occupied the third largest (16.7%) market share in U.S. following GM and Toyota in 2009. The company is best known for its rugged trucks and sport-utility vehicles in the past. Ford fiesta is one of the new-concepts which overturns Ford’s traditional brand imagine. The type can be also called B segment, which is targeted at millennials. This segment is characterized by smaller interior volume and fuel efficiency. It is forecasted a 38.7% growth till 2012. The current key competitors in the market are Toyota and Honda.
Alternative analysis
Alternative analysis 1: Continue the current social media campaign strategy in the future Ford market practice.
The great impact of the Ford Fiesta campaign is demonstrated by the fact that, with only the cost of $0.5 million per month to maintain, beside $2 million fee in cars and infrastructure (overall $5 million), they built up the Fiesta nameplate to 42% versus the benchmark of 23%, and they increased the monthly visit to the Fiesta website to 289k versus the benchmark of 144K. The event also gains about 289k unique visitors on the website, 14% of whom were highly engaged. In this perspective, such a kind of campaign should continually hold in the future.
Pro: It is definitely a cost efficiency campaign compared with the traditional media advertising campaign. From the perspective of social awareness building, although traditional media had a much larger immediate effect on sales than social media, social media mentions ultimately had a larger long-term impact because they occurred more frequently. Third considering the goal of brand reposition, social media is no doubt the best target platform for millennials.
Cons: First, compared with the traditional media advertising campaign, the social media campaign is hard to monitor during the on-going phase; considering the long time range, both the agency’s enthusiasm and deliverables quality will no doubt decline. Still, whether the user generated content can get the right messages in the same time representing the company’s imagine is still questioned. Third the awareness could not be immediately converted to sales, as Ford had not made the cars available for sale before it launched. It will also make the future ROI measurement more complicated.
Alternative analysis 2: Revising the current social media strategy to ensure both control and final marketing return on investment.
Ford can still work on the social media campaign considering both cost efficiency and great awareness generation. However, they can optimize the campaign on-going process in order to make it more controllable. For example, during the agent recruiting stage, the criteria are fondness for new things as well as preference for social media. In addition, car geeks should be considered. Secondly, during the campaign execution phase, Ford should foster the monitoring in addition to administration support. For example, they should consider setting up a threshold and elimination mechanism on agency performance to ensure the long-lasting high quality content. Finally, during the message communication phase, Ford can consider supporting the agency on the content viral communication, which made the campaign generate more social influence before it launched.
Pros: On one hand, the car geeks can have more topics and ideas in their product experience. Besides sharing missions on their social media, they are also considered as the lead users, who are willing to understand the new product well. They are supposed to have their online and offline social networks under the topics of cars, where they can be targeted for sharing campaign information. Also, the timely performance measurement can enhance both the agent’s content quality and quantity. What’s more, Ford should re-enforce their rules and regulations during the long-lasting campaign execution period. Third, viral communication can raise more topics and attention by involving those who did not participate as well as potential buyers.
Cons: First, it is considered as a risk that, if the car geeks are not satisfied with the car, they will post negative feedback online and will change the campaign into a firestorm. Secondly, for adding a threshold of the participant’s performance will no doubt increase workload, especially considering the 100 participants and high-volume content generation. And those participants who were eliminated will be upset. What was worse, they will relieve their negative attitude on the campaign through their social platform. Thirdly, the viral communication can never guarantee the result, as it can be misinterpreted by different people during its wide spread.
Alternative analysis 3: Leverage the social media pre-launching campaign strategy. In the meantime, still work on the traditional advertising campaign during product launching in the future.
Social media can only be considered a kind of supportive platform, which cannot generate sufficient attention, especially to the potential buyers. In order to change the brand perception and at the same time boost sales, we can still consider a traditional marketing campaign together with social media.
Pros: The traditional campaign can reach a large portion of consumers rather than small portion. It will be effective especially at launching a new product. The multi channel strategy will help Ford build up more awareness across platforms. The ROI can easily be measured, which will make the final outcome clearer. At the same time, social media, which will be used as a pre-launching tool and after-launching tool, will support the campaign in order to both increase brand awareness and make the campaign effective not only during the launch, but before and after as well.
Cons: this approach will need more investment in the overall campaign, and the traditional campaign will require more cost on all materials support. Maintaining a consistent message will also be a challenge. It may be difficult for the company to deliver the same message across different platforms throughout the long period of the campaign.
Summary:
Through a full analysis, I highly suggest Ford Fiesta should follow the third suggestion, which uses both traditional media and social media in order to build up a mixed-platform, three-phase campaign in the future. It will include a product pre-launching social media campaign in the first phase to raise brand awareness; the traditional media launching campaign to reach a large portion of the audience in the second phase; and again, a social media after-launching campaign to increase long-lasting brand awareness.
The only risk is consistent message delivery in the different phases as well as the large cost and efforts paid to the overall product launching.
