Green Car Buyers: Accidental Environmentalists?
Published: Saturday, September 01, 2001
Geralyn Yoza, product manager for Torrance, Calif.-based Toyota USA's gas-electric hybrid Prius sedan, says that consumer behavior in the car market is based on cost. “In our research, people are unwilling to pay more than $200 more for an environmentally friendly vehicle,” she says.
Most makers of alternative-fuel vehicles say their customer tends to be male, probably a technology geek, sometimes an environmentalist, and almost always an “early adopter”—a person who takes to the new far ahead of the herd. According to Garner, that profile fits the Honda Insight buyer, with one exception: Kids who want a fun-to-drive car also go for the Insight.
Yet Honda's campaign for the Insight appeals to early adopter and young consumers in only an indirect way. Designed to create an image of Honda as a green car company, Insight ads make no overt pitch to “sell” the car they feature. They are targeted at “high-end opinion leaders”—consumers with higher-than-average incomes and educations who the company believes are trendsetters. To reach them, Honda buys time on cable TV channels, on National Geographic television shows, and on Public Broadcasting System productions. The company also places print advertising in specialty publications like Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, and more general-interest magazines such as Newsweek, Time and BusinessWeek.
Toyota, on the other hand, targets early adopters and does it through print media primarily. “We focus heavily on new technology magazines like Fast Company, Wired and Scientific American,” Yoza says. Toyota also does a minimal amount of advertising in Time, Newsweek and Sierra, as well as on cable's Discovery Channel. “We're primarily in print because we want to convey the technology and how it works. You can't do that in a TV commercial,” Yoza says.
But what if you don't have the ad budget of a major car maker? There are ways for low-budget campaigns to get the message out, says Alex Campbell, communications director at Zapworld.com (ZAPP.OB), a Sebastopol, Calif.-based electric bike and scooter company.
While the company has done some TV advertising, more often it has gone with subtler, less costly approaches to get a big bang for the bucks spent, he says. And there is nothing quite like product placements in movies, rock videos and TV series to give a product a boost, Campbell says. Zapworld.com's electric scooters have shown up on such network TV series as “Just Shoot Me”, “Diagnosis Murder” and “Dharma & Greg”. And when NBC's “Today Show” featured actor Kevin Spacey riding a Zapworld.com electric scooter, the company scored priceless marketing—in both senses of the phrase.
“Those are the things that don't cost a lot of money and, in my mind, work better,” Campbell says. The company also makes the trade show circuit and is testing a concept store in a local mall.
A promotional venue that's become critical to car makers is the World Wide Web. While banner ads haven't been shown to drive sales, the value of a website in attracting early-adopter consumers is considerable, they say.
“Early adopters do a lot of their information gathering on the Web,” Toyota's Yoza says. “We've got a pretty comprehensive site, and it allows us to take advantage of links. For example, we were one of the partners with Earth Day and had a link to its site.”
Zapworld.com's Campbell says that there is no question that his company's website is a successful marketing tool. “Fifty percent of Americans are on the Net now, and they are the ones who can afford our products. We actually changed our name from Zapworld to Zapworld.com so that when people see our name, it's the same as the Zapworld portal.”