Shift to Social Media Has Meant Big Changes and Big Cost Savings at Ford

Some key points:

• It’s important to create an entertaining experience for people on social. Engaging people is fundamental to the campaign’s success
• Social has improved product awareness and consideration of Ford’s products tremendously 
• Ford has seen massive savings as they’ve shifted away from traditional advertising budgets and started using PR and internet marketing agencies.
• The skills Ford needs to run their marketing has shifted along with their shift to social.  

Source: http://www.mackcollier.com/ford-cmo-jim-farley-social-media-leading-to-massive-cost-savings-for-ford/

Transcription of Ford CMO Jim Farley Interview

What new insights has Ford learned from interacting in social channels, and how has that impacted Ford’s view of the customer experience?

We’re really excited because one of the things we’ve learned at Ford as we’ve launched more and more vehicles using social media is the importance of the actual experience of being involved in the launch. We’ve always thought of the customer experience as when you buy or service the car but in the case of the Fiesta Movement or the Focus Global Test Drive or even the Explorer launch, when we ask people to get involved in the launch of the product, we have to really think carefully about what we’re asking them to do and how much we give back to them in their life as they are involved in the launch. And that’s a new element that we never thought about. Going into social media launching, we were a little selfish at the beginning in the sense that we wanted the exposure. And now what we’re learning is the more entertaining we make it for the participants, the better it is for us as a company. And that’s probably the biggest linkage between customer experience and social media and launching new vehicles

Have you found social media most useful for loyalty, consideration or customer service?

We’ve really seen social media have the biggest impact in consideration because it’s allowed us to grow the awareness before the vehicles’ launch. Like the Ford Fiesta Movement did and grab attention from people who normally wouldn’t look at Ford. So social media has allowed us to connect with people authentically about our new vehicles and most of them wouldn’t had been considering Ford at all. In fact, we saw the Focus’ sales spike after we launched Fiesta because so many new customers came in looking at the Fiesta and discovered the Focus for the first time. At Ford, we knew we had the Focus but we were surprised at how many people didn’t know we had another small car.

Are there any areas that Ford can point to where social media has either lowered business costs, or improved existing process?

One of the real benefits of our benefits of social media is the dramatic efficiency we’ve seen. And it’s kinda in a unexpected way. By launching the vehicle early and getting people to talk about the new Global Focus and the new Fiesta in the US before it goes on sale, we can lower the amount of traditional advertising we can do after the vehicle goes on sale. That’s where really the massive cost savings have been. I’ll give you an example, in the Fiesta Movement, we have higher unaided nameplate awareness than Fit or Yaris and we spent 10 cents on the dollar compared to a traditional TV ad campaign. So by starting earlier and using social media to spread the word about the new product, we’re really reducing the amount of traditional advertising we have to spend.

How has your marketing team evolved in the past 24 months given your investment in social media?

The cool thing about the complexion of our marketing team at Ford has been over the last 24 months, especially as we’ve gotten into social media….well first, we’ve been growing. We’ve had 22 out of 23 months of market share growth, so we have added people to our team, especially in areas like Lincoln. The biggest change we’ve seen is in the kind of skills we need. What we’ve found is that the traditional lines between PR and the advertising team are gone. You know, the ideas have to be paid and earned and they have to be sorted out seamlessly. And so we need different kinds of people than we’ve ever had before and not only here at the company at Ford but also at the advertising industry and the kind of PR agencies we need to help us. More than the number of people, it’s really required us to have different kinds of skills and we’re still evolving. We need more people who can think creatively who can come up with ideas for a Facebook application; we can’t just delegate it to the agency. We have to, as a client, come up with these ideas. And then as we execute it, there can’t be any boundaries between the PR team and the traditional advertising team.

Ford made one of the most aggressive shifts into social media, while slashing advertising budgets. Were there any points at which Ford questioned this strategy?

Frankly, the biggest surprise to us is how mainstream this media has become for us. The Fiesta Movement is so popular, it really changed our thinking about the Explorer launch. That’s why we decided this summer to launch the Explorer on Facebook and have that one day where we celebrate Explorer around the world. And now we’re taking those ideas and going global with the Focus Test Drive that we’re announcing today. Have we been surprised? Absolutely. One of them is, “how do you execute something globally, how do you really get a global audience on Facebook activated around the new Focus?” It takes a lot of new thinking. Are there things that we would do differently? Probably. We probably should have moved a little faster and we probably should have done this a long time ago.

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