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 Selling General Motors Corp. cars to an under-35 crowd is about as hard as selling them on black socks with sandals.
While the Detroit-based automotive giant has models like the Chevrolet Corvette and the Cadillac CTS-V, its British arm, Vauxhall Motors Ltd., also has the aging Corsa, which is about as sexy as your grandmother’s support hose.
First produced in 1992, the Corsa has driven through an obstacle course of several versions, but for the past decade, it had also ranked perennially among Britain’s top 10 best-selling cars. Yet when it came to the younger purchaser, the Corsa had the Buick bug: Just 15 percent of Corsa buyers were under 35, as opposed to 30 percent for one of its main competitors, the Peugeot 207. In fact, the average Corsa buyer was more than 45 years old.
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The new Corsa made its debut on a sleek runway lined with images of the younger target audience, while a DJ and BMX-bike-riding stunt team kept the energy level strong.
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When Vauxhall launched the new Corsa model in September 2006, the Luton, England-based subsidiary was determined to make inroads into the less-senior segment that might view the previous model as a cargoyle. “To do that,” says Rebecca Amey, account director at the London branch of experiential marketing agency Jack Morton Worldwide, “Vauxhall needed to sell its salespeople on the new models first.” But how do you convey to a group who may be more familiar with Monty Python than MySpace the images and ideas that would appeal to a much younger target than the one they’re used to selling to? This cultural divide wasn’t the only pothole Vauxhall faced. “At the end of the day,” says Amey, “the salespeople just wanted quick nuggets of information they could use immediately.” Those were problems Vauxhall and Jack Morton decided to solve with an event that would turn around the sales pros’ thinking faster than a Ferrari goes from 0 to 60.
For one week in September, Vauxhall rented the Millbrook proving grounds, a vehicle-testing facility located approximately 50 miles outside London. It invited 1,500 salespeople from Corsa dealerships around the country to the legendary site to attend a three-hour session that ran twice a day with groups of up to 150 per session. “From the moment they parked and stepped out of their cars, we wanted them to see this was something different,” Amey says.
What the salespeople saw when they walked into the facility’s main room to register looked like a head-on collision between Hot Wheels and Hot Topic. Overhead spotlights illuminated Team Extreme, a group of BMX stunt bicycle riders and skateboarders tearing down ramps, while a live DJ and a beat boxer set the tone with a bass-thumping, adrenaline-heavy soundtrack. Projection screens and monitors alongside an oversized runway juxtaposed close-ups of the Corsa’s spiffed-out design, with images of Gen Yers (those born between 1977 and 2002) in their native habitats — on graffitied streets, at skate parks, and in coffee  bars. Then three new-model Corsas slid onto the runway like steel sharks. A stunt BMX rider flew over the hood of the lead car, and Shelley Perkins, Corsa’s marketing manager, popped out of the interior to give a 50-minute presentation. She focused on the Corsa’s goodies: satellite navigation, Bluetooth phone systems, translucent backlit dials, ergonomically designed seats, and more.
After the marketing manager’s address showed what Gen Y was looking for, Charly Massey told them why. Like the titular doctor in “House” brilliantly diagnosing a patient with an unfathomable condition, the founding partner of the London-based marketing-communications firm FoskettMassey Ltd. mapped the mind of the under-35 audience for the salespeople. For Gen Yers, she explained, the Berlin Wall barely existed, but AIDS always has. Vinyl albums predate them, and they have probably never seen a black-and-white TV. They shop at Amazon.com, listen to Groove Armada, and watch “The Office.”
Then Massey drove the connection between Perkins’ material presentation and her psychological one home with a video montage illustrating how Gen Yers view their cars and what the cars mean to them.
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Vauxhall salespeople paired up with Gen Y trainers to review the features of the new Corsa models before putting them to the test on the tracks at the Millbrook proving grounds.
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Few of the images were of the autos’ exteriors. Most depicted the inside of the cars, which showed that the Gen Yers thought of their cars as cribs where they chill with their friends. “They need cool gadgets which make them stand out from the crowd, and that will impress their mates,” Massey says. “So now when they come into your showroom, you can be confident that there are many things you can talk to them about that they will be interested in.”
Armed with the nuggets of information that would make it easier to sell more cars faster to this audience, the presentation wound down and the salespeople broke into groups of about 12 each, and approached the dozen Corsas parked inside. Twelve trainers — one for each car, dressed in street-casual clothes, and about the same ages as the 20-something to 40-something salespeople — ran through the car’s features, reinforcing the presenters’ key points. Then the salespeople moved to the Corsas waiting outside, and got fast and furious with them on the Millbrook tracks.
Jack Morton followed up with a survey of the 1,500 attendees. Scoring the results on a scale of one to 10, Jack Morton wanted to — and did — average at least 8.0 from attendees in the survey’s four categories: felt confident about the advertising campaign, found the youth presentation useful, felt they now had all the tools to make the new Corsa the best launch ever, and felt enthusiastic about the new Corsa launch after the event.
The event proved it had plenty of horsepower. When Vauxhall launched Corsa in September 2006, its goal was to sell 75,000 units by the end of the year. It came close, with 73,923. Then, in 2007, it sold 94,120, a 27.3-percent increase. According to Amey, “This event was instrumental in helping fuel the success of the campaign.”
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 Imagine it’s London in the year 1348. The Bubonic Plague has just arrived, wiping out almost 40 percent of the population. Now imagine you’re the head of the government’s Ye Olde Tourist Agency and you have to persuade travelers that London is still a swinging place to visit.
That’s the kind of challenge China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region faced in the spring of 2003 after SARS — severe acute respiratory syndrome — tore through chic Hong Kong like a viral tsunami. Nearly 300 people died of the pneumonia-like disease while thousands more in mainland China fell ill, igniting riots by a panicking population. In approximately nine months, from late 2002 to August 2003, SARS spread to 29 countries, infecting almost 8,500 people. Flightmares of plagues that spread as fast as colds at a day care metastasized in the public imagination.
The Hong Kong economy started collapsing. About one-third of the more than 500 daily flights in and out of Hong Kong were canceled, while some hotels reported 90-percent vacancy rates. Overall, the number of visitors plunged by 57.9 percent, with Citibank estimating Hong Kong’s two-month economic loss at more than $330 million.
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A gallery of familiar images from Hong Kong potential tourists would recognize — including a Tai Chi practitioner and a Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. flight attendant — were used to create an “everything as normal” atmosphere.
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By the end of 2003, SARS was contained, but now the fear of it was more contagious than the disease. With Hong Kong and therefore China depending so heavily on the city’s tourist revenue — which was 6 percent of the city’s GDP — the Chinese needed to quickly remedy the negative perception of Hong Kong as filled with seas of people strapped into surgical masks, and rebrand it as a premier — and safe — travel destination.
The government’s Hong Kong Travel Bureau didn’t wait long to act. In the summer of 2003, it contacted Extraordinary Events of Sherman Oaks, CA, to help it convince travelers that the former British colony was not just physically secure, but still an amazing city with great shopping, incredible food, and fabulous venues.
Together, the Travel Bureau and Extraordinary Events produced three events in three U.S. cities hoping to reach three separate sets of influencers: New York, where the travel press was concentrated; Miami, which was hosting the Travel Industry Association (TIA) International Pow Wow show, slated to be held in Hong Kong the following year; and San Francisco, where Asian-Americans, mostly Chinese, comprise almost one-third of the population, and which is a popular gateway to China.
The problem now was communicating the safety of a city once called the pearl of the British Empire, and now hailed as the Wall Street of Asia. The Travel Bureau and Extraordinary Events decided to serve up a dim sum of authority figures, Chinese cuisine, and martial-arts movie stars. Calling the campaign “Live It. Love It!,” it was a pop-culture comfort-food strategy: using authority to convey credibility, and familiar Asian icons to communicate safety.
Starting in New York, the Travel Bureau and Extraordinary Events hand-picked 200 travel and general-media outlets such as The New York Times and USA Today for an evening event held inside the “Good Morning America” studios near Times Square. While the media representatives noshed on the Cantonese cuisine Hong Kong is renowned for, the Chinese gave the event an official seal of approval with appearances by A-list Hong Kong authorities, including Donald Tsang, the city’s number-two ranking official.
After a speech by chief secretary Tsang, an event staffer activated a video that began to play on the nearby Times Square Reuters Jumbotron screen. The four-minute commercial starred Jackie Chan, the iconic comic acrobat of martial-arts movies and Hollywood buddy films.
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Charismatic actor and Hong Kong native Jackie Chan stepped out for his hometown, filming videos to promote the city’s appeal.
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Arguably Asia’s biggest box office star of the past 20 years, Chan wasn’t some plug-and-play celebrity. Hong Kong is Chan’s town the way Las Vegas was Sinatra’s. Chan’s long-time status as a spokesperson for the government of Hong Kong, frequent appearances in public-service campaigns, and $1.5 million donation to SARS charities ensure that he is not only beloved but believed in, too. In the video, the charismatic Chan acts as if he’s shooting a commercial as he comments on why he was shooting what he was shooting — everyday Hong Kong residents and their lives — to show that life has gone back to its normal pell-mell pace of festivals, luxury shopping, elegant dining, and more.
Just as choreographed as one of Chan’s movie fights was the crowd scene outside the studio in Times Square. The Travel Bureau wanted a Kodak moment that could be used back in Hong Kong to show the event’s success. Knowing the average New Yorker can be counted on to flash something other than a smile, the Travel Bureau packed the area with a rent-a-crowd trained to react to the video as if Jackie Chan had just handed over his reported $15 million paycheck for “Rush Hour 3” to them.
Back inside the studio, after the video concluded, the event capped off when Kabuki screens placed around the room dropped down, revealing light boxes with the images from the new print campaign. Posing next to each visual was its real-life counterpart: a man clad in a Tai Chi outfit, a Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. flight attendant, a Hong Kong ferry sailor, and other quintessential — and non-threatening — Hong Kong images.
Subsequent Media coverage was responsibly wary, but shared the message: Hong Kong is safe. The ROI was simple: It was measured by how quickly travelers returned to Hong Kong. In 2003, just 15.5 million people journeyed to the city — a sharp drop from the 16.6 million who had journeyed there in 2002. But so quick and effective were the medical and PR responses that in 2004, 21.8 million visited, an increase of about 40.7 percent over 2003.
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 The Standard Oil Co. set the, well, standard as the most loathed company in the world in the 19th century. John D. Rockefeller’s oily operation crushed competitors, fleeced widows, and even conspired to blow up rivals. But lately, Standard’s descendants have been giving it a run for its money.
When a Gallup Poll asked Americans to rank 26 industries in a 2005 survey, oil and gas companies came in dead last — even below lawyers.
Like its sister oil companies, the Shell Oil Co. sat tight through outrage over the spike in gas prices following Hurricane Katrina, and public outcry as gas prices overall rocketed from $1.56 per gallon in 2003 to more than $3 in 2006, while the providers raked in billions of dollars of what some deem “obscene” windfall profits. When Shell president John Hofmeister started receiving high-octane hate mail — including a drawing of him hanging from a tree — he weighed the pros and cons of everything from ads slicker than an oil spill to consumer discounts at the pump, but ultimately decided Shell
better hit the road to tell
its side of the story.
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Shell president John Hofmeister addressed public outrage over gas prices with a speaking tour that listened as well as lectured.
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Trying to convince the public they weren’t so bad after all wasn’t an unusual tactic for oil companies. Years ago, for example, Mobil Corp. (now ExxonMobil Corp.) buffed up its image by sponsoring Metropolitan Opera broadcasts and “Masterpiece Theater,” and in 2000, Shell ran ads in the “Financial Times” touting its commitment to exceeding the Kyoto Accords on greenhouse gas emissions.
But this time Shell wanted to engage its audience with a complicated — and unpopular — message: that gas prices are set by ever-shifting geopolitics, not the oil companies, and that if we as a country want more and cheaper energy, we have to make hard decisions about where and how we’re going to get it. The best strategy to achieve this, Shell concluded, was to talk to people directly in give-and-take sessions. And the best way to carry out the strategy, it decided, was a series of personal appearances not by anonymous PR flacks but by someone actually responsible for Shell’s business practices: Hofmeister.
Targeting 50 cities it felt were cultural pulse points in the country (or which had a large Shell presence), Shell included the usual big-city media axis, but also smaller areas from the Sun Belt to the Rust Belt, such as Phoenix, Birmingham, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Seattle, and Honolulu, in an attempt to meet a wide spectrum of people.
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Shell Oil Co.’s 50-city listening tour stopped in major media hubs such as Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, but also included smaller Rust Belt and Sun Belt cities, such as Milwaukee and Phoenix.
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Each event unfolded in two parts. First, Hofmeister spoke for 20 to 30 minutes at a luncheon meeting, then fielded questions from
an audience. That was a warm-up for an evening town-hall-style meeting, where the audience consisted of civic, educational, and business leaders invited to meet for two hours or more to address in-depth topics that are usually debated with bumper-sticker slogans. For example, Hofmeister argued that the U.S. keeps itself militarily, financially, and even environmentally secure, but when it comes to energy, he said, current laws prevented companies like Shell from getting at 85 percent of the energy resources available in the U.S. The events also served as a lobbying effort. For instance, in Richmond, VA, he explained Shell’s desire to drill for oil off Virginia’s southern coast. To engage environmentalists, he emphasized Shell’s investments in alternative forms of energy such as bio-fuels, gasified coal, and solar power.
Near the end of each meeting, Hofmeister broke the audience into small groups to brainstorm answers to tough questions he posed, such as “What should Shell be doing to increase domestic oil supply?” and “What is your vision of the U.S. energy mix in the next 10 years?” Solutions, the exercise implied, come only when we work together to reach consensus — a far cry from the usual energy debates that are more civil war than civil.
After the tour closed in Atlanta last November, Shell estimated it had met its goal of 10,000 people. It compiled all the ideas and suggestions the meetings generated into a white paper that it plans to share with government officials as part of its efforts to coax them to craft an energy policy that allows more domestic exploration. By using events to spur an open and honest debate on a critical issue, Shell proved engaging the public can be far more than a shell game. e
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