In the ad, a car assembly
line robot happens to drop a screw. The supposedly quality-obsessed company
(GM) shows him the door. The Robot wanders the streets doing odd jobs and
wistfully eyeing the passing cars (all GM brands, of course); eventually, he
commits suicide by jumping off a cliff. Before you jerk a tear, relax; the
robot was merely having a nightmare. The moral of the story: GM is so
quality-obsessed, even robots on the assembly line suffer deep, enduring quality
lapse anxiety.
A commentary in BW (
More to the point:
The issue is GM quality and
consumer concerns about it. That consumer perception of poor GM quality can be
altered only by the product’s reality, and correspondingly by a factual
communication of the product’s new (if) reality. Objective quality facts (e.g.,
J.D. Powers survey), if available, will go farther than any sci-fi story.
Communicating objective, factual content is boring, you say? Well, isn’t that
what clients pay the ad creatives for—anyone can make a fictional story
interesting; the trick is to figure out how to make facts interesting.
Advertisers are well aware
of two broad Ad formats: lecture and drama—presentation, respectively, of
factual data as factual data (lecture) and narration of a story, factual or
otherwise (drama). In the drama option, if raising consumer perception of
brand’s newfound quality is the objective, the story has to be about a real
event, not about a fictional concoction. Stories of real happenings on the shop
floor that ensure zero quality lapse; of new design and production improvements
that index quality upgrades, of customers experiencing first hand the improved
quality, for example.
Fictional stories work well,
even great, when and if consumers have no negative concerns, and the brand
wishes, merely but importantly, to add, onto the solid core of product’s
objective merit, an extra layer of fun, emotion, mood, personality, lifestyle,
fascination, make-believe, dream, aspiration, or any number of other such
psycho elements. But when a consumer’s main reason for shunning a GM car is
his/her apprehension about core product quality, he/she is in no mood to feel
sympathy (or empathy) for a screw-dropping suicidal robot, especially if,
his/her concern is not as much that a screw might be left undone but that the
screw might be of poor quality to begin with!
Sincerely,
Ban Mittal, Ph.D.
My other Writings on Advertising