Applied Semiotics

A report from the frontlines of lifestyle event marketing

It is a beautiful, warm day in California's Great Central Valley. Fresno to be exact. I just ate a delicious lunch, which Toyota paid for with a $15 dollar gift certificate. I am about to take a Scion tC coupe for a test drive, something that I am mildly excited about. Paid agents, young good-looking people who are enthused about the Scion product have been paying me all kinds of loving high-touch attention for several minutes.

I am filled with a sense of well being for the Toyota Motor Corporation, USA.

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It is a well known fact that the weak link in the automotive industry's purchase funnel is the dealership.
On the one hand this makes a huge amount of sense - advertising agencies and other creative enterprises hire great talent to create brand and look for the product.
The dealership hires a clown to hand out balloons and hot dogs. Their staff works on commission - every human that walks in the front door is nothing but a man-shaped silhouette, a target that needs to be knocked down to make the sale.

But this disconnect is the great paradox of the industry! Ultimately the automotive industry is about... cars.

And cars are design objects. The number one piece of terrain between an intender and their purchase is the *physicality* of the car, this artifact *designed* from sheet metal, foam, plastic, and software. If the intender has their deepest hopes and dreams affirmed during this critical first close encounter, then the hardest sales job, the emotional sales job is over. The car "feels" right. And takes the quotes off feels - because the feelings of the intender are real.

So why is the dealership the weakest link when it should be the strongest?

How do we get the wonderful physicality of cars into the decision space of automotive consumers, literally put the product back into the hands of our customers? Especially when the retail experience of a car dealership is something that seems totally out of synch with the rest of 21st century retail universe?

You bring the mountain to Mohammed. You make meeting the product a natural part of their life.

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The Scion Drive Tour: Event Scene Analysis

Short version - this thing is a home run for Scion. It was a fun, hip, low key even that participants and passerby seemed to love.

Space: The Tower Distict
I'll be honest, I never expected to find this in Fresno. Microbreweries, cafes, bookstores... boho city. Interruptive advertising sucks when it's jamming up your episode of Desperate Housewives, but somehow it's delighful serendipity when spatially dropped into your lunch break. The location, right off the main drag, pulled in a lot of foot traffic.

Time: Lunch and Dinner
Set up next to a popular (and good) cafe, the Scion team was set up to grab both the lunch and the dinner rush.

The People: Good looking & Smart
I mean, this seems pretty obvious, but someone put a lot of effort into staffing this event. Smartly dressed in Diesel jeans and fitted Scion tshirts, the crew looked the part and knew their product inside out. They came off as smart, not pushy. And they were quietly efficient - this thing ran like a swiss watch.

The Approach: Gentle, Let the product do the talking
Nobody was out doing pushy "sign my petition" marketing. If you asked a question about what was happening, they were waiting to answer. If you asked what was going on, they explained how the test drives worked and asked if you wanted to try out a Scion (very nicely and sincerely, I might add).

How it worked:
Top to bottom, the whole thing took about 25 minutes, and that was with me asking a number of pain-in-the-ass undercover corporate operative questions. I timed other people and saw folks do it in as little as 10, with most people coming in around 15 or so minutes. This is a crucial metric - if you took 45 minutes or so to eat lunch on your lunch break, you could easily do the drive on a whim and still get back to the office without your absence becoming a major production. This is opportunity-based product-focused marketing at its smartest. The whole thing was a Scion-branded experience.

All I handed over was my drivers license. I signed a single form - and that was just a release. 30 seconds tops. I asked for the tC and the booth operator radioed back to the lot. When I got there Mike was waiting for me.





The Drive:
Mike asked if I wanted to drive, or be driven. I said I wanted to drive. The traffic control staffer even took our picture. And that was it - we were off.

Mike was my product specialist, and he was no temp agency flunky. He knew the product backwards and forwards - displacements, horsepower, gearbox, options, you name it. There was no a single question I asked that Mike didn't know the answer to. Seriously, this was the man that Toyota wanted working this show. He came off as very confident and friendly. All told we drove about 10 minutes, on a mix of urban arteries and residential roads.

Scion is a great product. Fit and finish was surprisingly good, especially considering that the Yaris comes off as such a piece of commodity-grade junk. This little coupe was a pistol to drive, and the Pioneer sound system was great. And for a vehicle that folks were climbing in and out of all day, it was immaculately clean. Prep was super.

I asked Mike about how they transported the cars from city to city - car carrier or motorcade.

"Oh, we convoy - get them out on the road."
"Do you do opportunity marketing, I mean, talk to people at rest stations and restaurants?" I asked.
"Oh yeah, we always answers people's questions, and in a group the cars make a real impression."

This event squeezes out branding and product experience value at every possible turn.

Impressions:
EVERYONE was having a great time at this event. It was very low key, but people left smiling. The mix of staff, location, a free lunch, and direct product interaction is an alchemical brew. I walked away with a great impression of this product, to the extent that I would consider the tC as a purchase if it only had a little more headroom (I'm tall).

Does a lifestyle event like this generate the numbers that a national media campaign does? No. but does it have the pricetag of national media? Also no. And this has to be, dollar for dollar, a phenomenal promotional value. BIG brand and undoubtable translation to sales. The people that were hit were *hit*. They walked away *knowing* Scion. They would talk about it when the got back to campus or the office.

The whole thing had a lightweight, almost guerilla feeling to it. These guys traveled light, but my guess is they create smart-bomb results - this is putting the marketing right on the target, but then letting the target opt-in.

Folks, this is the future. Spatially interruptive marketing that comes off as a surprise picnic, not something to be TiVoed past. How do you create awareness about the event? How scalable is this kind of marketing? Big questions, but ones that need to be answered in our Post-television, time-shifted world.


Additional commentary and complete photoset at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnny_n/sets/72057594107162390/

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