I have written recently about how the power of social media has influenced the values of classic cars, and makers of new automobiles are trying everything in their power to get us conversing about their latest products, too. They’ve become hashtag junkies – and it’s painful to watch even the most luxurious and exclusive brands launching marketing offensives with thematic identifiers.
Bentley, to tie in with the unveiling of its new SUV, the Bentayga, launched a campaign centred around the hashtag #beextraordinary – something that will probably be entirely lost on the company’s traditional customer base. There was even what Bentley referred to as an “activation launch”, where a handful of cities around the world were used to get the word out. Dubai was one of them, and the party piece was the aforementioned hashtag projected at night up the entire side of a hotel exterior in Dubai Marina.
This unsettles me. I’m not averse to using hashtags myself, don’t get me wrong. I am an avid Instagrammer, and have amassed a following of about 1,000 people, mainly because of the way I tagged my photographs before I made my account private. But car manufacturers, perhaps putting too much faith in the power of the hashtag, have gone a bit mad with them.
Apart from #beextraordinary, practically every new luxury car that’s launched has a hashtag its makers want us all to use. On a recent Audi press event for the new Q7, the attendant journalists were encouraged to use #experiencegreatness whenever they mentioned what they were doing on their social-media accounts. Jaguar wanted everyone to #feelxe when advertising its new XE last year, and Cadillac is now pushing #daregreatly in a bid to reinvent itself as a pioneering automaker.
The purpose of hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other media is essentially to group together conversations or start new ones, but they’re double-edged swords. Consider the speed with which #dieselgate spread a couple of weeks ago, in reference to Volkswagen’s fraudulent emissions-altering technology – a raging storm that refuses to abate.
Now and then, a hashtag campaign reaps huge dividends. The online insurance company Esurance offered the US$1.5 million (Dh5.5m) it saved by not taking advertising airtime during this year’s Super Bowl to the social media user who had the most influence with #esurancesaves30. In the 36 hours following the Super Bowl, the internet was ablaze with this hashtag. It was mentioned on Twitter 5.4 million times, there were 2.6 billion worldwide social impressions and Esurance’s social media following rose by 3,000 per cent, from 9,000 followers to 267,000.
Nobody could argue the effectiveness of this new phenomena when it’s used intelligently. But Bentley and other luxury car manufacturers seem to be doing little more than cheapening their core brand values in the desperate search for clicks, followers and social mentions.
I’m sure that when I get to drive the new Bentayga it will be extraordinary, even if I still think it’s been beaten with the ugly stick. Whether hashtagging everything to death will prove effective or detrimental for luxury-car brands remains to be seen, but much to my chagrin, it shows no signs of going away anytime soon.
motoring@thenational.ae
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