Concurrent with its bailout bid, General Motors has been running a feel-good commercial for its much-anticipated Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid vehicle due on the market in 2010. “Innovative” or “sustainable” aren’t words typically associated with GM. But the company deserves credit for 1) inventing The Long Marketing Campaign, and 2) demonstrating the irony of wasting (marketing) resources on a supposedly green product.
The Volt was announced as a concept car in 2007, and has since received a lot of attention. I expect it will continue to generate it until its target launch in 2010. That’s three years of publicity, advertising, and plenty of other marketing efforts. It’s The Long Marketing Campaign. Here’s what shifts everything into the realm of science fiction: we are being sold something that’s not even scheduled to exist until two years from now! We are being sold the future.
The transformation from the 2007 edgy concept design to the 2008 generic production design poses the question as to what else will drastically change about the vehicle – I hope the plug-in hybrid engine is still the goal. What’s more, schedules can change, which is a particular danger for what’s advertised as a totally breakthrough technology. And as these past few weeks have demonstrated, the company may not even exist two years from now…
Compared to all that, the irony that the vehicular green savior of the tanking brand would be consuming this many marketing resources is almost secondary. Seth Godin has pointed out how new marketing doesn’t fit companies stuck in the old marketing worldview. The same goes for sustainability: old companies like GM can’t do sustainability because they don’t get it. It doesn’t fit their old molds. The video should offer a hint: it aims to generate credibility and indicate forward motion, but it also underscores ossification of a brand.
The only thing that’s completely sustainable about all this is the entertainment value. GM may have also inadvertently invented The Long Joke.
