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The unforgettable H-bomb of motor advertising ...
A decades-old Hyundai ad boldly claimed it matched BMW and Mercedes for half the price—but calling your customers fools isn’t the smartest way to sell a car.
What is the most memorable motoring advertisement, whether terribly good or awfully bad, you have ever seen? AR
Many of both, but the most “memorable” must be one I saw about 30 years ago and will never forget. It said that if you have just bought a BMW or Mercedes, then you have just spent twice as much as you need to, because the Hyundai Sonata is just as good at half the price. Or words to that effect.
Marketing is not my specialty, but calling your potential customers idiots, and endorsing a complement to the peerless reputation of your rivals, is an “unusual” way to woo hearts and minds...or market share. And although it may be true that some people spend “needless” millions on a prestige brand out of ignorance, bigotry or arrogance, it is a fairly safe bet that they don’t think of it that way.
People who buy BMWs and Mercs don’t do it to save money (though in the long term they might). Most of them won’t even know (or care) what their limo cost, because it doesn’t matter to them. Well, except if you halved their price many of them would take their money elsewhere. They need (!) to be expensive.
By what inversion of logic does praising Germans help sell something Korean to Kenyans? BMW and Mercedes won’t have filed an ethical complaint to Hyundai. They more likely wrote a thank you letter for printing their brand names on national media in huge letters as an independent benchmark of quality...for free!
What other ad have you ever seen that claimed its product was “as good as” another...and named it? And what other ad have you ever seen where the advertiser prints his rivals’ names bigger than his own? No need to wonder why not.
The only legitimate role of that Hyundai ad was to be so unusual and outrageous that everyone who saw it would discuss and remember it.
Perhaps it put a then little-known brand “front of mind” (as advertisers say), while the public hitherto had either never heard of it or didn’t know how to pronounce it. It rang a very loud bell. Like it or mock it, no one failed to notice it and talk about it.
The BMW and Mercedes “H” bomb isn’t a unique approach, merely an especially memorable example of the genre because it lacked a crucial ingredient: wit.
The fact is that buyers of prestige brands choose a car because they believe it is the best, and they pay the price because they can. Many are so certain of, and so loyal to, this superiority that they haven’t tested another make for decades. Perhaps they should...just to be sure.
Land-Rover’s “The Best 4 x 4 x Far” does not offend, because its customers agree, and everybody else is happy to give an ironic smile that there is something they don’t know. The slogan “The Car Ahead Is Always a Toyota” is easily accepted because it is almost always the truth.
