What Kind of Car Would You Be?

The Challenge:

A local car dealer selling luxury European automobiles including Audi, BMW, Porsche and Maserati needed to find a way to drive showroom traffic and sales during the summer months. The company had recently invested heavily in a new website, and also wanted to convert a higher percentage of site visitors into qualified leads and sales.

The Response:

With such a wide range of brands to sell—Volkswagen at the “everyman” range to $100k+ Maserati, identifying a target audience and a common message that would resonate with each was nearly impossible without fragmenting the budget and producing a variety of spots for each segment was prohibitive. So I suggested an interactive campaign called “What Kind of Car Would You Be?” that would allow consumers to identify their own segments.

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Blowing the Roof Off

The Challenge:

One of my clients was the world’s leading manufacturer of a roofing underlayment membrane that protects homes from water damage caused by ice dams and wind-driven rain. Typically, the product is applied on a fraction of each roof—typically only the front three to four feet along eaves and in valleys where different sections of the roof meet at angles. Used primarily in more temperate regions with frequent freeze-thaw cycles, the product had never sold well in the Southeast.

During the 2004 hurricane season, however, a homebuilder in Central Florida applied the product to the entire roof deck of an unfinished home in desperation after hurricane Charlie had destroyed the roof deck, and hurricane Frances was approaching in the Atlantic. To everyone’s surprise, the underlayment, when applied to the entire roof deck, prevented any structural damage to the roof after hurricane Frances, but from hurricane Jean as well. So the question was “How do we get the word out about this to sell more product in areas in which it had never sold well?”

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Success in Bulk

The Challenge:

A national provider of cable TV, Internet and phone service was rapidly gaining market share in all but one state. Despite numerous aggressive offers and consumer studies, no one could understand what the barrier to penetration was, especially since consumers rated this company’s products and services as comparable, even superior, to those of its competitors.

The Response:

My first action was to look at any publicly available information that could identify what made this market so different from others. The one major distinction was the profusion of homeowner associations, which I estimated to comprise about 40% of the residential market. Using one of the company’s geospatial engineering tools, I noticed that our penetration density in most of these HOAs was very light.

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