By JENNA GIBSON
J Alumni News staff
A class at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is giving new meaning to loving your car.
An advertising and public relations campaigns class has spent the semester working on an integrated marketing campaign to increase interest in the 2010 Honda Insight, a hybrid.
Advertising students presented their campaign to the client.
The campaign is part of the Honda Insight Marketing Competition, which pits 21 schools against each other to see who can come up with the most effective way to introduce the product to college students. The winning class will get $5,000 for their school.
“The goal of the program is to gauge the intention to buy the Insight among college-aged students,” said Nancy Mitchell, an advertising professor who teaches the UNL class.
Along with the chance to compete for prize money, the class gave students real world experience. In other classes, students may have worked in small groups on hypothetical products. In this class, students working on the Insight competition split into departments such as public relations, advertising and finance. They worked on creating real advertisements for a real product.
“It’s a lot more broad and applicable,” said Rae Moore, a senior advertising major who was the head of advertising for the class. “It’s definitely working knowledge.”
The class began by doing preliminary research through surveys and focus groups to determine what students already knew about the Insight. They found that many students treat their cars almost like pets. Some even go so far as to name their rides.
“We found that … most people, no matter what kind of car they have, have some kind of relationship with that car,” said Michelle Wiedel, a senior marketing major who is the campaign’s account coordinator. “They kind of view them as like a person or a pet because they spend so much time in them.”
That idea sparked the campaign’s slogan — “Love is INSIGHT.” The class created videos, window clings and other advertisements that focused on the idea of a dating relationship between people and their cars.
While the Insight is a hybrid — a vehicle that combines an internal combustion engine with an electric motor — the UNL class decided not to make that a big part of their campaign.
“We focused on the thought that college students care about the green movement, but it’s not their first priority,” Wiedel said. “We wanted to highlight this car and make it be cool and kind of as a bonus have it be a hybrid.”
The members of the Honda campaign posed for a photo at the Union plaza
This may set the UNL group apart, she said, because many other schools used fuel efficiency as the focus in their campaigns.
A high point for the class: It held a fall event at the Nebraska Union that included food, prizes and the chance to get inside a real Insight.
More than 700 people attended, Wiedel said, and about 3,000 people saw the car in the Union throughout the day.
Moore called the event a success.
“Pretty much everyone who came through connected the dots with the things they saw around campus,” she said. “I’m definitely impressed with how the event turned out.”
The students are working on compiling and analyzing post-event surveys to see what students think of the Insight now.
While they haven’t finished looking at all the surveys, Wiedel said, knowledge about the Insight increased exponentially.
“You can see we changed perception of the Honda Insight,” she said.
The students will present a detailed explanation of their work to Honda and EdVentures, the group that organized the competition. Students from the top three schools will travel to California in December to present their ideas and compete for the $5,000 prize.
“I think our campaign is pretty clean, and it’s creative, and we had a vision in mind,” Wiedel said. “I’m pretty optimistic about it.”
For more information and to see the students’ work, visit www.loveisinsight.com or look up UNL Honda INSIGHT on Facebook.
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