One of the best ways to see the so-called “old rules of marketing” in the modern day is by looking at most major automakers. The “old rules of marketing” focused on getting information as broadly as possible to as many people as possible. And the information that is transmitted is as generally relevant as possible.
For cars, things like financing deals, safety ratings, and maybe a headline feature or two. These features heavily rely on the numbers, like vehicle towing capacity and miles per gallon. While important, if you do not understand what these numbers mean for you, it’s hard to understand how they serve to benefit you by buying that particular vehicle.
Pretty high up on the page that Chevrolet has for the Silverado pickup, they detail the different engine options that are available to choose from. Immediately, we see some of the issues. With each engine, you’re given the displacement, cylinder count, and fuel type. All of these take external research to understand what it means for the potential consumer who doesn’t already know what having a 5.3 liter (even knowing that’s what the L means can be another barrier) V8 can do for you. And saying “ready to take on almost any task that comes its way” is a vague statement that does not do much to inform the consumer. These numbers and terms will mean something to those who already know, but from Chevrolet’s website, there is not much to begin that informative process.
This follows those old rules, get information out, if someone knows what it means they know. If they don’t, flashy images and broad terms will do the rest. And this is not limited to Chevrolet. Many automakers are doing the same thing of just focusing on advertising, rather than building a relationship with the consumer and informing them of how the product will improve their life.
Compare this with a website that follows the new rules well, Apple. When talking about their products, sure Apple will give you some numbers, but they spend far more time telling you how those specifications will actually help you. Consider the image below:
On this page, Apple tells you that you’ve now got “a complete movie studio in your hands”. It’s not doing that with the numbers of the processor speed and cores and numbers like that. Apple provided the numbers, and now it explains what those mean. Your projects will get converted faster than before, and in higher quality too. The pitch for the iPad Pro is that you can do all of these heavy-duty tasks with it, when before maybe you needed a whole computer setup and it would take time, now you can take your iPad with you and do that anywhere you are. This is building that relationship with the consumer, they can see themselves doing that task. And when a potential consumer has a use case in their mind of what they can do with your product, that’s when it turns into a sale.
https://www.chevrolet.com/trucks/previous-year/silverado/1500