When they are not sticking their noses in the Used Tire business and trying to disrupt used tire markets globally GoodYear Firestone and Pirelli North America have attempted to smear the used tire industry with their Half truths about used tires while they still sell em and so do most tire dealerships. The funny thing is while they have spent the better part of more than a decade trying to stop American Used tires from being exported they created an even bigger market for American used tires domestically one that now boasts over 30 Million used tires sold per year.
This is their idea of Good PR
Reprinted from NBC
By Ben Popken, NBC News contributor
In a wry gesture, Goodyear last week sent letters
offering free driving lessons to
traffic-challenged celebrities Lindsay Lohan and Amanda Bynes. But is
such snarky newsjacking a smart move for this iconic brand?
Bynes
skipped her suspended license hearing this week and has a court
appearance slated for Thursday for two hit and run incidents. Meanwhile,
Lohan said she's planning on suing a cook for slander for claiming last
week she clipped him with her Porsche SUV and claiming that she was
“slurring” and “smelled like alcohol.”
The nearly identical
letters Goodyear sent the two actresses say they're “sorry to hear”
about the latest “driving mishap,” and that they “understand” that
“driving can be a real challenge, particularly trying to navigate all of
the stop-and-go-traffic in LA and New York City.”
Echoing
sentiments felt no doubt by many Americans, Goodyear continued, saying,
“we are concerned for you...We're concerned for your safety.”
The
letter offered to fly the actresses out to the company's headquarters in
Akron, Ohio for private lessons with their professional drivers, “no
paparazzi allowed.” These trainers could show the “do's and don'ts of
driving safely.” After a few spins around the test track, “you'll even
be able to show Herbie the Lovebug a thing or two,” quipped the letter
to Lohan.
It's all pretty light as far as celebrity digs go, but
it feels a little weird coming from Goodyear. This is the tire brand of
trust and value. It's been around since 1898. It represents solid
Midwestern values, and is a stalwart of American manufacturing.
Until
now, one of its most recognizable marketing campaigns has been the
Goodyear blimp: a giant rubber-coated dirigible that idles over large
mainstream sporting events. It's slow. It's massive. It's authorized.
Its main goal is to get Goodyear's big yellow logo beamed out over
broadcast television.
It's pretty much the opposite of the Lohan
and Bynes zings. They were geared to appeal to celebrity news sites and
blogs and those who read them. They were created and executed quickly in
response to a piece of celebrity news. The playful tone and the use of a
source document primed them for social media viral uplift.
Twitter? Perezhilton? TMZ? Not exactly what you associate with a venerable American tire brand.
Opportunistic PR
“It's
opportunistic PR,” Chris Curran, Goodyear's Vice President of
Communications Public Relations, told NBC News. His signature appears at
the bottom of both letters. Curran said that a piece of public
relations material has to do one of three things: educate, entertain or
inform. “This does all three,” he said. “It educates who Goodyear is,
informs that there's an offer, and it also entertains.”
He
disagreed that the move was out of the norm for the tire company, noting
that several years ago they convinced Detroit Pistons guard Richard
Hamilton to style his hair so that it looked like Goodyear's new
TripleTred tire.
“Something that is fun and quirky gets across in a
better way,” said Curran. “Obviously, we do normal PR and
communications initiatives to promote our products, but sometimes it's
'fun' to do something a little outside the box that gets people
talking.” A lot of people inside the company have said that the letters
“were kind of cool,” too, he noted.
Goodyear isn't the first big
brand to try to ride the buzz off a piece of news. Last year,
Abercrombie & Fitch offered members of the Jersey Shore cast cash to
not wear their clothes. Two years ago, when Obama made an
offhand remark about holding a “Slurpee Summit” with Republicans, 7-11
made an official offer to the White House to supply them with red,
white, and blue colored Slurpees.
Tim Nudd, editor of Adweek's
blog AdFreak, is not a fan of the Goodyear initiative. “It's definitely a
cheap publicity grab, and if you're a generally well respected brand --
which Goodyear is -- engaging these kinds of marketing gimmicks will
only cheapen your brand accordingly,” he wrote by email. For Goodyear,
your “absolute No. 1 brand attribute is trust. Why align yourself in any
way with people who are reckless?” he said. “It's transparent
celebrity-baiting.”
Raw
security camera footage from outside a New York hotel shows a vehicle,
driven by Lindsay Lohan, drive through the scene, and a man who alleges
she hit him, chase after the car.
But what do the people
think? Judging by the comments about the campaign on Twitter and blogs,
they mostly think, “LOL,” “Hilarious” and “Brilliant.” So, success?
If
there's one guy who can sort it out, it's Alex Bogusky, formerly one of
the main creative engines behind advertising agency Crispin Porter and
Bogusky. Among others, they're the ones responsible for all those
unnerving “Wake up with the King!” Burger King ads. He should know a
good counterintuitive campaign from a bad one.
And guess what? He likes it.
