The car rental company Hertz recently added a new feature to the cars people can hire: dog cages are fitted in it. This is a great thing for people that own pets and love to bring them when they go on a hiking weekend for example, or wherever they go, this can be useful.
The problem is that the service is very specific and doesn’t speak to all the persons that rent a car. Indeed, not everybody has a dog. So we can say that at least 50 per cent of Hertz’ customers don’t care about this new feature.
The question they have asked to themselves was how they could reach dog owners, and only them. This segment is particularly wide and hard to define, as dogs are universal. No matter the age, the sex or the social level, every kind of person is susceptible to have one.
This is always delicate to communicate for a specific part of your market, as you don’t want to confuse others with a message they could not understand or they could interpret as a new turn in the company strategy. It can also be a waste of money to target a wider audience than the one you really need to.
Hertz decided to use the technique of direct marketing to reach the specific target of dog owners. The concept is nothing new you will say, but the way they have used direct marketing is both creative and funny. Instead of trying to reach the dog owners, they decided to attract… their dogs!
Their plan was simple: they hid dog bones under bushes and behind lampposts, where only a dog could find them. The bones came with a message attached to it, which was directly delivered to the owner when the dogs returned to him with his “trophy”. The message indicated the link to Hertz’ website, and a phone number to book a car.
I think this is a funny way to do direct marketing, which usually appears boring and annoying to me. Everyday we receive tons of spam mails for every kind of product, we don’t even pay attention to it anymore. And who likes to receive a phone call to hear some kind of advertisement?
What Hertz did used a part of humor, and to me this is highly effective. I would be amused if a brand was trying to reach me this way, and at least your dog has won a free bone!
Sylvain Daressy
This is indeed an interesting way to use an ingenious marketing channel and perhaps aptly applies the theory of Gareth Kay in regards to making the process of marketing more participatory, as we have learnt in the class.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes me apprehensive about the technique is the Return on Investment of this marketing technique. Even if the success rate of a spam mail be 1 in 40 it may still be economically more rewarding. Shooting 40 mails is easier than placing strategically one bone.