GM, Ford Take Consumers for a Ride

There’s nothing like driving a car to decide whether you want to buy one. And for U.S. car buyers, it’s even better if the dealership salesperson isn’t hovering around somewhere to see if you like it. That’s why General Motors and Ford, among other automotive brands, are putting more resources into test-driving events and other experiential marketing.

GM, for instance, is taking its Chevrolet, GMC and Buick brand vehicles to 25 U.S. markets this year — most recently, last weekend to CitiField in Queens, N.Y. The show features 130 vehicles, 70 GM models, and about 20 non-GM vehicles that consumers can drive for comparison purposes. There are seven driving courses including an on-road course for Chevrolet Volt, the extended-range hybrid to which GM is still trying to accustom American drivers.

“We’ve done a lot of ride-and-rives throughout the country, and that’s an awesome way to get people to understand the product and really appreciate it,” Cristi Landy, Volt’s product-marketing director, told brandchannel. “You can do all the talking you want, but getting behind the wheel really does it for people.”

Ford established the efficacy of competitive test-drive programs a few years ago with its Swap Your Ride initiative, which it is continuing across its brands and vehicles. Lately, Ford has been trying a similar experiential approach to its more fuel-efficient F-150 pickup trucks. The company introduced six-cylinder engines into the product lineup at the end of last year, the first time in a few years that the iconic pickup has been available in anything other than eight-cylinder displacements.

To persuade presumably skeptical pickup-truck buyers that the smaller engines still could put out sufficient power, Ford took its EcoBoost version of the F-150 to 70 cities around the country, including the homes or places of business of more than 12,000 consumers who had raised their hands online to try out the vehicle.

“We gave each of them 30 to 45 minutes to test-drive and then a product presentation,” Doug Scott, Ford’s truck-group marketing manager, told brandchannel. “There’s no substitute for that hands-on experience. And it has proven to be extremely successful: We finished in February and already have seen a buy rate of more than 8% of the 12,000 people who participated, which is very successful for these kinds of programs.”