Moving Ford

Which is exactly what Ford is doing




Automakers continue to struggle.

Meanwhile, Ford continues to create contemporary messaging that taps into how people think and feel about their cars.

Ford continues their investment in the celebrated Drive One campaign, which actually is a breath of fresh air in a very boring, very predictable category, now into its third year.

Ford sales continue to grow.

And frankly, you can't imagine that a robust trend like this is going to reverse itself, not by a long shot, not anytime soon.

The moral, obviously, is run a healthy company. Build great cars. Innovate. Use technology to make cars great, safe, and fun.

Above all, know your customers, know how they think, and connect.

Then, make money.

Ford does it all, and does it exceptionally well.

Maybe Ford is the new Toyota.

Wait a minute, I have a black box?

You do. It’s in your car.


Did you know there’s a system in your car, like an airliner’s black box, that captures critical data about your automobile, starting just a few seconds before your crash and continuing for a second or two after the airbags deploy?

You didn’t? Well, you do now. It’s called an EDR, electronic data recorder.

Depending on your car, it captures the speed you were traveling, the angle of your accelerator, your gear shift position, whether you were using your seat belt, even the angle of the driver’s seat. Some EDRs record data on brakes and the anti-lock braking system.

Toyota’s EDRs, for example, do all of that. And despite the gazillion cars it sells each year, until this week there has been only one U.S.-based laptop – one laptop in the entire country – capable of reading the data.

In other words, data from your Toyota crash is locked up in the EDR and Toyota’s laptop is the only key to getting it out.

In fact, until this week, according to the Associated Press, Toyota refused to allow access to the laptop and even the data, and only provided printouts, sometimes edited, when supoeonaed by a court.

Interestingly Ford, Chrysler and General Motors cars have EDRs, too. But they have open architecture that lets law enforcement officials – or anyone for the matter – recover the data in seconds. Nissan has something similar. But other car makers have other strategies. Honda, for example, also controls access to Honda crash data and their spokespeople say it’s only made available by court order.

The point here, tragically, is that Brand Toyota has just taken another hit.

This is absolutely is the worst case scenario for anyone managing a brand in a crisis.

If the only break in the crisis is one piece of bad news after another, that’s something no corporate television commercial can ever fix.

Toyota is still in critical condition.

Tiger's apology (2)

Not apology, mea culpa

Yesterday, we watched – actually, all of us took part – in Tiger Woods’s counseling program.

Think about that.

If it’s true, it explains the absence of apology language in Tiger’s remarks. The event wasn’t about apologizing. After all, he made a profound apology in December last year.

It wasn't a press conference, either, which explains the absence of journalists.

Part of his counseling program, we believe Tiger had to admit his errors, confront them, accept them, and acknowledge the impact his behavior had on people who are important to him and who care about him. Except for his wife Elin, those people were in the room yesterday.

So why couldn’t he call his friends and associates individually, or invite them over to his home? A friend in alcohol recovery might call you and say the same things – which has happened to us. Yesterday, Stewart Cink, the PGA professional golfer, said that has also happened to him.

Sadly, a phone call doesn’t get the job done. Tiger is a celebrity as big as the planet. His confrontation and acceptance, inevitably, must be equal to his reality, which is not just enormous, but global.

Which explains the television cameras, the importance of major news coverage, and even the words Tiger used – and probably wrote himself.

All of which puts Tiger’s talk in a different perspective. Clearly, it needed to be as honest, sincere, and authentic as he could make it. It was about his life, his future – and literally, who he is.

In fact, when he said that Elin didn’t need an apology, but will be convinced by his behavior, he meant it.

And in his amazing talk, he included all of us in that statement.

Tiger's apology

Did it really happen?


The curious thing about Tiger Woods isn’t Tiger, frankly.

It’s all of us.

As golf fans and hero worshippers, we put Tiger on such a pedestal, and he dazzled us brilliantly for so long, that it’s very hard for us to deal with the fact that he is human and does what humans do. He lives his life. He tries to make things work. He runs into headwinds and events – like we all do – that slow us down, steer us off track, and sometimes hurl us into unyielding trees.

Today, Tiger took a step to made amends for what hurt his family and disappointed the people who are important to him.

“For all I have done, I am so sorry,” was Tiger’s headline on the 14-minute speech, delivered in a tightly controlled, closely managed event in the clubhouse at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra, Florida, championship home of the PGA Tour. That statement came midway through his remarks.

What is interesting about the proceedings is that only three journalists were invited to attend, but had no opportunity to ask questions.

What is interesting about the speech is that the only apology delivered was the parents of children who looked up to Tiger. Very deliberately, his language was about being sorry.

His wife, Elin, Tiger said, did not want a verbal apology. She will wait for his behavior to improve. For her, he told us, his improved behavior will be the best apology.

Nevertheless, in emphasizing that this nationally televised event was not a press conference, Tiger’s management team left dangerous questions dangling in the air.

If it wasn’t a press conference, what was it?

If no apology was offered to his fans, his business partners, and his colleagues on the PGA Tour, was an apology actually made?

“I am sorry” means what it says – I am sorry for what happened. It hurts me deeply. Well, we are sure that is exactly how Tiger feels. And, yes, sorry is an expression of regret. But “I am sorry” is definitively not the same as “I apologize.”

An apology means I am sorry for you, too, and I regret that.

Semantics? Possibly.

There was a lot of emotion in Tiger’s talk, which took courage for him to deliver. He did make an unequivocally powerful commitment to living a different kind of life.

But this was also a carefully scripted event.

Apology language, it seems to us, was carefully scripted out.

Toyota, moving forward?

What do you do?


We just checked.

It hasn’t changed.

It’s still being used.

The Toyota motto, amazingly, is ‘moving forward’.

Brand strategists notice these things.

Everyone on the planet, it seems, has noticed, too.

As in ‘moving forward’ scarily, as your Toyota or Lexus inexplicably accelerates?

As in ‘moving forward’ relentlessly, as you pump the brakes on your Prius, in vain?

As in ‘moving forward’ uncontrollably, while the power steering on your Corolla has different ideas about where you want to go?

Perhaps Toyota made a conscious decision to protect the slogan.

Perhaps it's been overlooked.

Perhaps it should have been quietly removed.

Now you have Toyota

A big challenge

Actually, it's right up there with Tiger Woods.

It's a very big issue.

Suddenly, the world knows your cars have a major risk factor -- which most people really don't understand, and you don't, either -- but you have to make decisions. None of them nice ones.

For consumers, the options are limited: drive your Toyota, or not drive your Toyota. Sell your Toyota, or not sell your Toyota (at a discount, presumably).

And if you are a Toyota dealer? Think about your inventory. Your obligations. Your debt. Your uncertainty about the models that have driven your growth.

As an automobile dealer, you don't expect or anticipate this.

As a consumer, the car you own is now a question mark.

Interestingly, virtually everyone who sees themselves as a brand expert talks about Starbucks, or Apple, or Harley Davidson.

We used to say, fine -- but what are you going to do about Chrysler?

Now the reasonable question is, what would you do about Toyota? Or Lexus, the luxury brand of Toyota?

There are four issues:

(1) Identify the issue (hopefully, your culture allows you to celebrate those who pinpoint the problem, rather than destroying them).

(2) Apologize (hopefully, your culture allows you to fix the problem, apologize, and then move on).

(3) Solve the problem (that's obvious).

(4) Celebrate the solution (respect your customers, provide incentives for them to buy new cars, and welcome journalists and others to your HQ, research lab, and testing facilities, so they learn what actually happened). Then, perhaps, they can tell the rest of the world about what you have done to make things right.

Major lesson: openness.

Major opportunity: making openness happen.

Action: acting now, not waiting.

Your future: building on positives.

Rethinking social media

It's the biggest topic on the planet.

Just when all of us thought everything had been invented -- thanks to the grip that Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube have on our imaginations and the hours we spend online -- well, out of the blue, comes Twitter.

More billionaires in the making, you say. All power to them. We agree.

Flickr is out there, too. Don't forget Flickr. Flickr is extraordinarily beautiful and engaging.

As we consider this new media environment, we cannot escape the fact that the social media sector is under attack.

Once pure, it's now a greed target.

It's being increasingly defined-redefined-and-perhaps-even-unnecessarily-complicated by consultants, advisors, media companies, online firms, public relations consultants, publicists, talent agencies, and virtually everyone else under the sun, all of whom are telling you it was invented for marketing.

Fine.

But it wasn't really invented for marketing. It was invented for people.

Actually, it happened, just like everything else that has happened online, because it could happen. It could be done. It was cool. So let's do it, innovators said.

And the rest of us said, that's brilliant. And we did it.

But if we take a pause in the proceedings, we may find time to make two observations:

(1) Social media has been around a long time, relatively speaking. Copying the known world on your emails is a kind of social media; primitive, but real, and you've been doing it for a long time. Participating on an online discussion forum with the rest of your Avatar-disguised Best Friends is solid social media, and it's been happening for years. Instant Messaging on AOL kicked off social media for an entire generation, fouled up the family computer desktop, and introduced a billion kids to what the computer was actually there to do.

There's no mystery about any of that. It's how we live now.

And now that social media has been classified, named, adopted, and increasingly co-opted by marketing organizations, spokespeople and their advisors, a powerful question remains:

(2) Do you really want marketing intruding on all those places where you -- launch your opinions -- post anonymously -- talk with your friends -- catch up -- look at their pictures -- post140 -- and so on?

Absolutely not.

Critics say the rush to capitalize on social media has all the hallmarks of whatever once had to do with, well, creating dot-com businesses for any kind of wild idea under the sun, credit default swaps, and political fund raising campaigns. We don't agree. That's harsh.

We do believe, however, that 'social media' ain't magic, ain't mysterious, and frankly, it ain't new. It's something all of us have been doing, in one way or another for years, and we will keep on doing it, again, for years.

All of us love it, and we love what we do.

In fact, after everyone thought writing was dead and television and the telephone had destroyed the written word, suddenly all of us became writers (once again), and we discovered that some of us are extraordinarily good writers and some of us are extraordinarily funny. (Cynics among us say the rest just use profanity.)

Nevertheless, for a marketer, figuring out social media remains a challenge.

We say, there's no challenge in remembering that marketing, fundamentally, is about (i) connecting with people, (ii) building a relationship with them, and (iii) expanding that relationship over time.

In today's world, more than any other time in the planet's history, our online world makes communicating and relationship building (i) easy, (ii) affordable, and (iii) relatively and potentially productive.

Even if people don't personally buy what you are saying, or what you are selling, at least they can become advocates who love you and share your good news with their friends.

We don't like the term, 'social media'. We prefer the term, 'social marketing', and we don't even like that much.

So use Twitter, if you have a reason (or a celebrity on board). Use Flickr, which is truly one of the most under-utilized resources for marketers. And by all means, use Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and all the rest of it.

But also, please, consider your own power, your own resources, and your own creativity.

Think about creating something fabulous for your friends, customers, prospects and influencers that is immeasurably more satisfying than any of the ideas above. Then use it to enlarge your world and expand your influence.

After all, it's the inventors and innovators who flourish in this world. They always have. They will continue to do so.

So be an inventor. Be an innovator. Invent your future.