Buzz Marketing series - Ford Kuga #2

Buzz Marketing Series - Ford Kuga - #2

March 23rd, 2009 · No Comments

Image by FordKuga via Flickr

The new SUV Ford Kuga was presented in September 2007 at the Frankfurt car show before the official commercialization in May 2008 in Europe. The kinetic design was positioned as a major differentiation factor illustrated by the concept car Iosis. One main objective is to acquire new clients which were not considering the brand before.
The launch was supported by a traditional ATL and BTL marketing campaign under the claim: Let your imagination rule. Some specific activities have supported the willingness to be consumer centric, e.g on-line game to develop the advertising campaign by consumers (FR), mini-website Ford Kuga, owner’s on-line community…

Key dimensions
Search results on Google.com and Google Insights
- # of search results: Web 1 020 000, Images 392 000, Videos and news 2 513
- Period: March 2008 to March 2009

Key highlights
The launch has generated a peak of traffic and overall visibility in May 2008. The web visibility came back to the previous level afterwards. The overall appreciation in blogs and forums is extremly positive about the design, quality and driving of the car. The attention of potential clients is focused on pricing, driving reviews and other SUV (mainly VW Tiguan) based on related web searches in major european countries (source Google Insights France, Germany, Italy, UK and Spain).

The visibility has been concentrated amongst car afficionados while the content was split in an interesting way. Searches in web category show a specific focus on car magazines on-line and related car websites where driving reviews of the car are pushed on the foreground. Images and videos content is generally connected to more emotional and subjective comments through personnal blogs (see Breakdown of search results for image category on page 2)

I think that Ford has done a very good job in organizing the launch while the planning was though through (before summer vacation) and prior the commercialization of new Ford Ka few months after. A specific effort has been done on multi-media content (images and videos) provided by the brand.
Even if the car industry is facing major troubles, the “after the Launch” period would have been appropriate for building momentum from positive feedback acquired during the launch phase. In this specific case, the Buzz marketing could have been more “out of the box” supporting a more disruptive positioning.

The car is positioned as different from competition but the approach of the follow-up of the launch is rather conventional.