As far as consumer products go, cars are a big deal. For most people the amount of money spent on a car is surpassed only by the purchase of a home. It’s therefore not surprising that car ads are the holy grail of the advertisement industry and ad firms are constantly trying to find creative new ways to syphon off that particularly large pot of money from consumers. Anyone familiar with the popular American television show – Mad Men will remember the outrageous lengths the firm of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce went to the last season to win over the Porsche account.
While not quite at the level of Porsche, when it comes to American cars Cadillac epitomises luxury and exclusiveness. To Americans, the name Cadillac still conjures up images of the good life and a successful fruition of the American dream. During the 2014 winter Olympics, Cadillac aired an ad for its new electric hybrid car – the ELR, which sought to capitalise on this enduring myth.
The ad starts with a middle-aged man standing in front of a large swimming pool in his backyard asking himself the existential question: Why do we (Americans) work so hard? He points out that in other countries people do things such as walk to work, stop by cafes, and take long vacations (the whole month of August off!). Why aren’t Americans like that? The answer turns out to be some outdated cliché about the superiority of the American work ethic and a love for “stuff,” i.e. material goods, like his mansion with the pool.
While this ad was not going to win Cadillac any European consumers anytime soon, surely its strategy of pandering to American materialism would have made it a winner in the US market. Right? Well, not quite. As it turns out, a huge swath of Americans also found the ad to be offensive and out of touch.
Not only was it universally panned by the media, even on YouTube, usually the black hole of human intellect and good behaviour, the majority of comments the video received were negative. Interestingly, the aspect of the ad that was criticised most heavily is the grotesque materialism that is upheld as the ultimate reward of hard work.
Cadillac’s major competitor Ford took advantage of the backlash against the ELR ad to offer a different answer to what the American work ethic can provide. The Ford parody of the Cadillac ad went viral as soon as it aired and garnered hugely positive responses.
The parody features an AfricanAmerican woman – Pashon Murray –an activist and the founder of sustainable agriculture company Detroit Dirt.
The ad starts out with Ms Murray asking the same question as the man in the Cadillac commercial: Why do we work so hard? She then strides through compost heaps and a community garden while she explains that her work involves collecting dirt (such as food scraps from restaurants and manure from the zoo) to keep them from polluting the landfills and help the city grow green, healthy vegetables. She concludes that you work hard and believe that anything is possible in order to make the world a better place.
The execution of the Ford commercial is flawless and from an ad-war perspective it is pure genius. But beyond just a bit of jousting between two car companies, the hugely positive response to the Ford ad shows that a shift is starting to take place within the American consumer base.
The ethos of working hard for individual glory or for crass materialism is not something that is appealing to a new generation of American consumers. A similar trend can be observed in Europe and it’s starting to catch on in places as different as South Korea and Brazil.
Ideas such as community and the collective good is the new cache of cool in increasing larger segments of people. This shift comes from a profound realisation that our ability to exploit natural resources to feed the capitalist consumerist machine is no longer a viable path to the future.
This concept is also slowly starting to gain momentum in public policy. In South Korea, Seoul has declared itself to be a “sharing city” and the government has taken a wide range of policy measures to help organisations and businesses that are enabling sharing of resources and cultivating the public space. Similar measures are being explored at a potentially larger scale by the European Union.
But back to the genius Ford commercial. It shows that savvy big businesses can also be a part of, or even help lead a shift towards conscious consumption. Instead of hiding their heads in the sand and outdated rhetoric they can be a powerful agent of change.
Businesses everywhere, even in emerging economies such as ours, can learn much from the Ford example to help lead us towards a more sustainable future. In an age of instant globalisation where trends like conscious consumerism is catching on among growing segments of the population, this is a move that will not only make the world a better place, it might also be the smartest business strategy.
