Seeing the facts that Nissan is having aggressive
plans for the future of the Leaf, reducing its price
and ramping up production IIRC, you would certainly
think that they see the Leaf the same way that
Toyota saw their Prius one decade ago.
Relatively slow start, but ramping up and a waiting
list until suddenly they appear to have sold over a
million units. I hope and somewhat expect Nissan to
do the same with the Leaf: make it profitable enough
for them, it appears to be well-engineered enough
to be mass produced and become a "bread and butter"
line in their program.
(Remember the loud exclamations by GM engineers about
the Prius that there was no way Toyota could make a
profit on these too complex cars? And that against the
backdrop that around the same time Toyota released numbers
showing that they had achieved break-even on the Prius)
Time will tell the story on the Leaf.
Cor van de Water
Chief Scientist
Proxim Wireless Corporation http://www.proxim.com
Email: xxx@xxx.xxx Private: http://www.cvandewater.com
Skype: cor_van_de_water XoIP: +31877841130
Tel: +1 408 383 7626 Tel: +91 (040)23117400 x203
-----Original Message-----
From: xxx@xxx.xxx.edu [mailto:xxx@xxx.xxx.edu] On
Behalf Of EVDL Administrator
Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2012 11:16 AM
To: Electric Vehicle Discussion List
Subject: Re: [EVDL] advertising
[quote]On 17 Jul 2012 at 10:06, Electric Blue auto convertions wrote:
> 99 % of people who are going to buy something have already made up
> their minds. no amount of advertising will change that. ... Look at
> the news networks there all against EVs of any kind. People actually
> believe news peoples opinions .
This may be true for you and your friends, but experience and a lot of
marketing research show that advertising makes people buy stuff.
That's how Hyundai managed to sell thousands of their really abominable
early Excels in the US about 25 years ago. Advertising also completely
changed the image of trucks and SUVs. They were once perceived as
vehicles for farmers, tradesmen, and sport devotees, certainly not for
executives and families.
As for whether people trust news reporters - while anecdotally some
people seem to be almost religiously devoted to certain rather loud
commentators, in 2009 the Pew Research Center reported the results of a
poll showing that trust in news media had reached an all-time low. A
majority - 63 percent - said news articles were often inaccurate. Only
29 percent said the media generally "get the facts straight."
Of course a lot of this is like politics - negative advertising always
eventually splashes back on you. Some media spend as much of their time
knocking other media as reporting, which only serves to further reduce
confidence in the news media as a whole. I won't go any further with
this since it's off topic, except in the sense that it probably doesn't
matter all that much what news people say about EVs, since less than a
third of their audience actually believes them.
> Rolls Royce runs NO ads in the US ... wonder why.
Because they're not a mass market product. Neither are Corvettes, and
you don't often see ads for them either, do you?
Rolls had a record year in 2011, selling 3,538 cars, a 30% increase over
2010. Toyota sales were down 7% to 1,644,661 cars in 2011. (Possible
reasons that Rolls grew and Toyota shrank will be left as an exercise
for the reader. ;-) Toyota is a mass market company. Rolls is not.
Presumably Rolls builds enough profit into each car that they don't need
to sell large volumes. Nor would they want to; they're selling not just
a car, but also prestige and exclusivity - which incidentally are part
of what Tesla are offering, too.
For a large company, the decision to advertise or not is usually a
tactical one. GM probably didn't advertise the EV1 because it wasn't
profitable, and they were losing money on every one they leased.
Indeed, by all indications, it was never intended to be profitable.
They expected and/or wanted it to fail.
(An aside: supposedly, when GM showed the Impact prototype at the 1990
LA auto show, one of their executives, possibly Robert Stempel himself,
was standing next to a member of CARB. The CARB rep was praising the
Impact and its potential to the heavens. Stempel listened for a few
minutes. Finally, his unease and disbelief growing, he asked the CARB
guy, "You're not going to make us actually BUILD that car, are you?")
On the other hand, the Hyundai Excel was designed to be profitable over
the long haul, even after the cost of an extensive ad campaign.
I'd like to be the proverbial fly on the wall in Nissan's boardrooms;
then I might have some idea about their ad strategy for the Leaf.
Guesses: it depends on how much they're making (or losing) on each copy,
and when they expect it to become profitable (if ever). It depends on
whether they're sure they have a solid supply of materials, especially
the battery. And it depends on how they define success for that car.
GM claimed they were going to "make a business of" the EV1. They
didn't.
So far I don't recall hearing Nissan say anything similar, but they seem
to be more serious about it than GM ever was. I sure hope so. Time
will tell.
David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA
EVDL Administrator
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[EVDL] advertising
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