Kevin Harrington // marketing // blog

I thought car customers were hard to get hold of these days. You wouldn’t believe it at Motorworld Volvo in Oxford. I asked to talk to someone about leasing a Volvo and I was told to phone some number in Chipping Norton. Now, as I had bothered to walk through the door and there was not another customer in sight it seemed a tad daft for them to loose contact with me.

And loose contact they did. Lancaster Reading, part of the Jardine Motors Group, were enormously hospitable. Dale Radford sorted out info and quotes. They stand a chance of getting the business. Easy really isn’t it?

So my tip #37 for surviving the credit crunch is: talk to your customers if they bother to come and see you …  and don’t send them away to do your work!

Volvo, at the recommendation of their agency Mindshare, have started a campaign to annoy potential customers right across Europe. Well done.

I say this based on my experience. The essence of the campaign is a Quick Response (QR) mechanism. This uses a 2D barcode on print advertising.

The Swedish car maker’s Ice White campaign has been built around the theme “open up and come alive”, and uses the print ads to provide readers with instant access to additional web content on their mobile. >>> more

My experience of Volvo QR: text the number on the page, download a reader, do it again as it didn’t run, do it yet again as it didn’t run, then get told my phone ( a 12 month old BlackBerry…hardly a Nokia 3310!) was not compatible.

So I have no idea what I would have been told if Volvo had been using technology that was accessible from my phone. Perhaps when they do an agency review I may find out.