Tweak The Beak, Press The Flesh, Reap The Rewards: Acura Does An End Run Around The Press

This weekend, Kamil Kaluski’s CarGuyDad blog featured a first drive of the refreshed Acura TL. Nothing new there, right? The introductory event was in Hollywood. The guests were flown in, shown a bit of the ol’ high life, and sent out for a day of road drives and parking-lot semi-autocrossing. Again, nothing new. This is all standard fare for press-preview events. Every working autojourno could sleepwalk through such an event, and most of them do.

There was no sleepwalking at this Acura event, however, because there were no working journalists. In fact, the people evaluating the less beaky, greatly more tasteful 2012 Acura TL on this particular press event weren’t members of the press at all. They were Acura owners.

Political consultant Karl Rove is infamous for his vigorous “chase the base” tactics, but he didn’t invent the idea that it’s easier to market to your existing customers than it is to capture new ones. Automakers have been doing it for years, whether through the direct approach of loyalty incentives, the soft sell of “invitation-only dealership previews” for new models, or the simple “reinforcement advertising” of NASCAR sponsorship. With certain infamous exceptions, it’s a virtual certainty that at least half of the purchasers of any given automotive brand will return to purchase again from that same brand. Easy money, and it’s relatively easy to increase that percentage through savvy “base” marketing and, you know, not building a complete piece of junk in the first place.

What’s better than selling more cars to the people who already bought from you? Turning those customers into evangelists. Sometimes, this process happens organically; ask anybody who’s ever owned a ’77 Accord, a first-generation iMac, or the “P90X” DVD collection.

Of course, we’re not in 1977 any more. Honda no longer makes products which are light-years beyond the competition, and this is particularly true for the star-crossed Acura line. Back when the Accord was cheaper — cheaper! — than a Nova, every new Honda customer immediately became a loud-mouthed jackass forever braying the praises of his wonder-hatch to anyone who failed to flee the scene upon eye contact. Thirty-five years later, the Acura TL, which can trace its ancestry all the way back to that first Accord, now costs as much as a Cadillac, lags the aforementioned ‘Lac in more than a few metrics, and is associated in many former owners’ minds with explosive, repeated transmission failures. What’s a brand to do?

The TL received a minor makeover for 2012, which meant that Acura was expected to provide another all-expenses-paid, luxury-at-any-cost press preview for the Web hipsters and the print dinosaurs. Given the TL’s “wrong-wheel-drive” chassis, the chilly reception it received upon its debut a few years ago, and the write-it-on-the-plane approach to “journalism” taken by the auto press, the TL marketing team almost certainly knew what would happen. The local papers would write litterbox filler that neither praised nor damned the car, AutoWeek would write a terrible, awkward piece which simply comes to a halt in the middle of an otherwise inoffensive paragraph, and a few Robert Farago wanna-bes would savage the poor car into the dirt. Worst of all, it would cost millions of dollars to get that “awareness” of the facelift out there.

Honda’s done some unconventional press stuff before. The debut of the Crosstour was held in the lobby of a hotel in Novi, MI, with no travel support or accomodations available. That kept a lot of people away and let the company debut a car which was almost certain to receive a poor reception without too much fanfare. For the TL, they chose a different path, and one which is likely to set a precedent: in addition to the press preview, they had a customer preview.

Customer previews aren’t new, but they are almost always either static displays at a dealership or parking-lot drives at a local convention center. This customer preview was different. Acura asked their customers to write an essay explaining why they should be included. The winning entrants were treated to a full press-preview level of luxury and involvement with the car — but instead of being bored, polyester-clad hippos wallowing through yet another stop in an series of endless watering holes, these customers were thrilled to receive the perks that the “Wheels” guy from the Springfield Journal And Gazette takes for granted. They felt privileged. They enjoyed themselves.

Most importantly, it’s almost certain that every Acura owner who attended this event went home feeling involved with the brand. They were in possession of special information. They’d driven a car the public hadn’t touched, and they wanted to share the news about it. A group of loyal, committed customers were reborn as brand ambassadors. Each one of them is likely to convey a positive impression of the car to dozens of others — and many of those people are likely to be in the correct demographic to purchase an Acura TL. Birds of a feather, and all that.

I wouldn’t be surprised if every person who attended this customer preview ends up “selling” at least one TL to someone. Compare that to, say, bringing a small-town newspaper guy to the press preview. The cost would be the same, and the benefit would likely be nil. Bringing one of the Ark Music Factory — excuse me, High Gear Media — bloggers to the event would accomplish even less, unless lonely Web spiders have evolved enough intelligence to purchase a car and enough stupidity not to compare that car with the Audi A4. Here at TTAC, we didn’t get any invite at all, which saved the nice people at Honda a thousand dollars in tire replacements plus spared them the complaints from whoever would be unlucky enough to have the hotel room beneath mine.

Savvy marketing, indeed. Naturally, the people at Ford and GM are doing it wrong while Honda does it right. In two weeks, the aforementioned companies will be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring their freeloaders — minor-league bloggers, readerless writers, and “social media influencers” who vomit streams of illiterate, infantile idiocy onto the smartphones of two thousand reluctant “followbacks” — all the way to the New York Auto Show, all expenses paid.

The purpose of these refugee flights is, apparently, to carpet-bomb relevant auto-show news off everyone’s Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, and blogrolls. Trust me, GM would be better off giving ten or fifteen Traverses away to its most outrageously vocal on-line advocates. Alternately, they could dig up the hole in California where Atari reportedly buried one million “E.T.” cartridges for the 2600VCS system, give those cartridges away as a gesture of goodwill towards the taxpayers who saved their scaly hides, and bury the aforementioned Traverses in the resulting hole. That would save the rest of us from an endless stream of “LAX-JFK OMFG NYIAS GM!” Tweets, and it would take some of those monsters off the streets before any more children are unnecessarily frightened. Double win.

I’ll be at the NYIAS, by the way. On my own dime, of course. You can find me at the Acura booth. I’ll be looking for Heather, the stunning young lady who stood next to me for my Acura TL video last month, and I’ll be giving the TL itself a second look. I’ve heard good things about it, from people I trust.