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The Challenge
A West Michigan automotive supplier invested significant levels of time and financial resources to develop an exciting new technology. The company had been perceived as number two in this product line and needed to move marketplace perceptions to a par with its principle competitor.
Our Action
We targeted several groups of key opinion leaders—people who had the standing and credibility to influence OEM decision makers—and set out to remake their perceptions of the company and its technology.
Early on, we created a background session for influential automotive journalists. However, we knew it would be an extremely difficult sell to get journalists to visit the company at its West Michigan base, and a typical road-show presentation just wouldn’t cut it. Therefore, our strategy became one of cutting down the amount of time journalists would need to invest.
To accomplish this, we chartered a plane and flew to Detroit early in the morning to collect a group of six key journalists who agreed to participate. We had them in West Michigan by mid-morning, and gave them open access to our CEO, and to our leadership in engineering, R&D and marketing. We also provided them with tours of our advanced product research labs. After an informal lunch with the company’s leadership team, we had the journalists back on the plane and back in Detroit by 2:00 in the afternoon.
The Results
Our initiative generated a number of highly positive stories about the company and its technologies in key publications. Those stories became part of our later presentations to key automotive analysts (who also drive opinion) and played an important role in persuading the analysts that the company and its technologies were serious competitors. As is usually the case, the analyst view ultimately found its way back to key decision makers at the OEMs. One of the publications that participated in the initiative, Popular Science, ultimately selected one of the technologies it saw that day as one of its Best New Products Of The Year.
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