Hi everyone!

This is a summary of my individual project. I chose to focus on the Facebook activities of 3 car brands which I’m sure everyone has heard of, namely: Ferrari, BMW and Audi.

Introduction

Car ads are commonly seen on traditional media such as television and newspapers. However, it is increasingly prevalent to see companies advertising about their cars on a plethora of online platforms. With numerous car brands in the market, the question I had in mind was, how do car brands differ from one another in terms of their advertising campaigns and the underlying purpose of their approaches.

Research question

My research question explores the overarching idea of how these 3 car brands uses Facebook to attain their respective business goals. I further analysed the content posted by each of the 3 car brands in order to find out the purpose and underlying message that the brands are trying to get across to the audience.

Data Collection

My data collection period span over a duration of two weeks, from 22 February to 7 March. I have tracked indicators such as the number of likes on their official Facebook pages, number of likes, shares, comments and views (applicable only to video posts) on each of their posts to assess the level of brand awareness of the cars. Next, I proceed to individual post to analyse the message of each post and whether these messages resonate with their respective business goals by looking at the nature of the posts (pictorial vs video), their captions and hashtags (if any). This provides me with insights as to how each of the brand choose to engage with their audience.

Recommendations

Through my findings, I found that each of the car brands’ strategy has distinctive strengths and weaknesses. However, Audi appears to lacking as compared to the other Ferrari and BMW in the areas of innovative content and business-to-customers’ engagement.

Strategy: Hashtag Campaign, #Audi-Garde

Audi could revitalize its hashtags by creating more novel hashtags that would complement the hashtags of their cars. An example could be, “#Audi-Garde” that is align with their business goal that targets innovation. Audi could pilot a hashtag campaign that uploads pictures of the engineering process of their cars. For instance, a caption “Behind the scenes of #AudiQ5…do look forward to our next #Audi-Garde.”This strategy provides Audi with two potential benefits. Firstly, it generates buzz for the next Audi car. Secondly, with these pictures and the appropriate use of #Audi-Garde, it highlights a subtle message to the audience that Audi is consistently working to define innovation.

Conclusion

To conclude, with a myriad of benefits in establishing an online presence, car brands can no longer rely solely on traditional media advertising. Having established an online presence, Ferrari, BMW and Audi should continually enhance their social media strategies in order to secure a strong brand positioning in the market. As such, the recommendations that I have proposed are not the only solutions that these brands could implement, instead they should be on a constantly pursue new and fresh methods to bring their brands to greater heights!

Cheers!
Mingfai