Car Manufacturers Exploring New Advertising Outlets

There are already plenty of ways that car manufacturers, especially luxury or high-end manufacturers, try to grab the attention of the consumer, and many of them prove very effective. Entering racing circuits is a great way of raising the profile of your cars, for instance, even if the cars you build for the circuits aren’t available in any dealerships. Product placement is also a big one, especially in films. There are plenty of examples of films and television showing off a car manufacturer’s latest and greatest models in a favourable light, whether it’s the high speed chases of James Bond for Aston Martin or the oozing cool of Miami Vice for Ferrari. Even getting reviews from well-established magazines or TV shows plays a part in this.

Luxury car manufacturers have tended to stay away from the more common forms of advertising, such as billboards and television commercials. They know that their target audience will seek out information on them and that it’s a definite minority of people who can afford their cars. Because of this, they don’t need to seek out methods that broadcast their products to the maximum number of people possible. Instead, they can focus on creating an image and style for their brand and products.

With the rise of internet based advertising, it’s no surprise that the big luxury car manufacturers aren’t seen in banners or adverts plastered across websites, the same way poker sites, travel companies or even snack foods are. Instead, they have continued to create an image and rely on individuals that may be interested seeking them out. Aston Martin, for instance, created a short film featuring one of their cars that tried (and failed) to emulate the cool of a James Bond movie. They didn’t talk about the features of their car, they simply created an image that they hope people want to buy into.

Of course, the biggest feature of the internet is its ability to appeal to mass markets and draw in hundreds of thousands of visitors, millions if something like a short film becomes viral. Perhaps that is why there’s still so much focus on the tried and tested forms of advertising for these luxury car manufacturers; they don’t need numbers, they need style.

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Car Manufacturers Help Dealers Sell Green Cars

It’s been a problem for as long as environmentally friendly cars have been on the market; how do you get people to actually buy the cars you’re making? It’s all very well producing engines that consume biodiesel or operate on a hybrid system between electricity and petrol, or even electricity and biodiesel, but if nobody is actually buying these cars from the dealerships they’re sold through, you’re not actually doing the environment any good.

This has been a problem particularly for manufacturers selling cars in America, as the American market has been particularly resistant to efficient motors, preferring large gas-guzzlers. Combine this with the way dealers operate, where they only make money if people actually buy cars from them, and customers will only buy the cars they want, which aren’t the energy efficient ones, and you run into a problem.

Dealers have begun to find ways around this though, with a number of initiatives appearing in the last few years. These are all helped by the rise in popularity of greener cars anyway, and the increasing amount of manufacturers that are creating them, but to see the efforts of the manufacturers actually reaching down to the dealerships has been seen as a very good sign.

Car manufacturers are now beginning to offer credit plans and incentives to dealerships so that they can better provide for green cars, which makes them more attractive. They are also making more credit plans available to customers through the dealerships, hoping that this will encourage more people to buy into green cars.

By backing up their technological efforts towards green cars with monetary incentives, it looks like more and more people may find it preferable to buy a more efficient car than the gas guzzling alternatives.

In addition to this, another major hurdle, particularly for electric or biodiesel cars, is a lack of fuel stations that can cater to them. The green car manufacturers are also taking this into account and working to improve the infrastructure for green cars, another step towards increasing the popularity of green cars.

Often, top-down schemes like this come from the government, who will subsidise people to have their homes made more energy efficient, but now that governments worldwide are pressuring automotive manufacturers to cut back on how much pollution they produce, schemes like these may become much more common.

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