Marketing Vehicles: Does Volvo Always Play It Safe?

“If you reduce Volvo’s advertising pitch to humanity to one single adjective, what would it be?” I regularly ask my students. “Safety!” they always holler. That’s a noun.

But let’s not quibble over your biggest takeaway here.

First Rule of Marketing: To market anything effectively, make one single point and make it well.

For decades, marketers championed the USP: unique selling proposition. Unique means one. Today, they love repeating the Ping-Pong (sometimes Tennis) Ball Theory. If I lob 12 balls at you, you’ll catch zero. But one? You’ll catch it.

My grammatically wrong students were profoundly right: Volvo owns the adjective safe. Like McDonald’s owns familial, as in families. And Tim Hoser’s owns Canadian.

It’s not that other manufacturers aren’t safety-focused, but Volvo got there first, loudest, and remained consistent. Take this U.K. magazine ad, which achieved the 1980s equivalent of going viral (crack for advertisers).

Decades later, Volvo still preaches safety.

Another rule marketers preach is to have the entire company live the brand. When fetching Volvos for review, Ontario automotive writers had reps tell them “Drive Safely,” even though Volvo’s slogan had evolved to “For Life.” 

Beyond consumer ads, Volvo’s commercial truck marketers follow the party line too.

NB: This rule isn’t so restrictive. Consider.

You can prove “safe” in millions of ways. Advertise intervening electronic stability contro? Check. Or computers that stop you from running over the cat while watching cat videos on your phone? Check.

Even speed-sensitive steering can be a safety feature.

Examples? With speed-sensitive steering, Granny can park easily at Bingo Palace without dinging your XC60. And your 23-year-old son who speeds — where do you think he learned it? — performs more accurate (safe) turns returning from college. 

So why did Volvo walk away from “safe” on advertising’s biggest calendar day?

Take Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving Day, and Back to School, and stack them on top of each other. Then carefully stack Mother’s and Father’s Days, Easter over that, and, of course, Valentine’s Day.

Presto! You’ve got the vaunted attention viewers pay to Super Bowl advertising. Speaking of pay, these ads cost untold millions in media expenses, plus production and public relations costs.

And speaking of careful stacking, the NFL is more litigious than a 32-year-old starlet divorcing a 90-something billionaire. You can’t even say Super Bowl three times without cloven-hoofed lawyers appearing, bearing writs in a cloud of brimstone.

So why did Volvo deviate to an ad like this?

The are no real rules in advertising, except money talks.

For one day in 2016, Volvo’s message shifted from “practice safety” to “get a free car for someone you love.” Every time some other auto brand’s ad appeared during the Super Bowl, viewers Tweeted who they’d give a free Volvo to. Brilliant!

The Twitter conversation shifted from complaints about the extortionately expensive ads to buzz about Volvo. Which paid nothing and technically broke no rules. Volvo played it … safe.

It’s been said that creativity without strategy is art; creativity with strategy is advertising. Walking away from its main message for those days leading to Super Bowl Sunday was a safe, cheap gamble. It cost only Volvo’s monthly retainer fees to its creative agency — whom it could always fire if it didn’t go well — and an XC60. Sales of which jumped 70 per cent the next month, Volvo’s biggest ever sales spike.

The real takeaway? When it comes to advertising, the rules are more like what Pirates of the Caribbean’s Captain Barbossa said regarding the Pirates’ Code: “They’re more like guidelines.”

In marketing, as with pirates, the only true rule is money talks.