Is difficult worth doing….
Today the press has been full of talk about the new Honda ad airing tonight on C4 during Come Dine with Me. Following on from their headline grabbing ads, Cog and Grrr, Honda have gone one step further and are now throwing people out of planes in the name of promoting the brand!
Based on the widsom of Honda’s founder who is purported to have stated ‘difficult is worth doing’ (now the tagline used in the ads), the new ad features 19 skydivers attempting to form the word Honda in the air. The stunt will be shown ‘live’ and in ‘real time.’ Unless it rains. In which case a rehearsal jump filmed yesterday will be shown.
Of course this is all very innovative, publicity grabbing - and no doubt award winning- but do the car buying public really care that much? Do they appreciate the fact that the stunt is live? And is the reported £500k cost really worth it? I suppose the question should be - is difficult really worth doing?
May 29th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Like you say, I think this will please some in the industry and no doubt the Big Cheeses at Honda but I think it will pass most of the public by. I’m not sure I would have chosen ‘Come Dine with Me’ either…
May 30th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Difficult is worth doing, so long as it’s effective and therefore worth the investment. On balance, the £500,000 (reported) and all the effort feel to me like time and money well spent. Honda continue to strive to distance themselves from their Japanese and Korean rivals through innovative and unusual marketing ideas - Earth Car, Cog etc - good luck to them.
May 30th, 2008 at 9:41 am
Well, it got Emily and others - er, that’ll include me, then – talking about Honda, albeit with our marcoms as opposed to car-buyer hats on (“Come Dine with Me”… prime programming for the media and marketing chattering classes, surely?!).
You can bet this is part of a larger integrated campaign (e.g. including viral, PR, etc.), and that off- and online WoM generation was included in any ‘calculation’ of the potential return on investment – notwithstanding that it’s extremely difficult to meaningfully pre-assess the holistic effect and consequent value of this type of comms.
But the absence of, say, quantitative assessment measures should never be allowed to get in the way of a (great) business-building idea. After all, considered risk-taking – especially where pros and cons are rigorously debated – lies at the heart of many a business success.
It could be reasonably argued that the ‘difficult’ of bringing the skydiving concept to life is a good way of setting-up the ‘difficult’ faced by Honda when rebuilding the Accord – but you gotta visit the website to make the connection. Time, web traffic, tracking and, ultimately, sales will tell whether it was worth doing.
So I’ll pose a different question: Is difficult worth doing if it isn’t helping to sell product? It surely isn’t if it’s only for difficulty’s sake!
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:26 am
I’ve since seen the other ads with the fancy editing, etc.. have to say much better than the live ad itself. Also worth noting that Come Dine With Me didn’t pick up any viewers on the back of the publicity, in fact it actually dropped around 200,000 viewers!
On the flip side if it had been in the first episode of Big Brother, first centre break with position then it would have been making a much better worthwhile statement.