‘CARS’ – How to check the Marketer’s sanity

In 2017, Adidas sent out an email to participants of the Boston Marathon which, although unintentional, was viewed as being in very poor taste. In this vlog, Grant explains how to check the marketer’s sanity using the acronym ‘CARS’.

In 2017, Adidas sent out an email to participants of the Boston Marathon.

The email was titled; ‘congratulations, you’ve survived the Boston Marathon.’

It was promoting its sportswear, and obviously it was talking about the fact that they’ve survived a very long race, but only four years after the Boston bombing, it was seen in very poor taste and got them into considerable trouble.

Of course, it’s not just the faux pas, but when your marketing goes out, you want to make sure it’s as effective as possible and, therefore, it’s worthwhile having a benchmark to make sure your marketing is going to work.

The acronym I use as a way of remembering a sanity check is ‘CARS’.

CARS stands for Convenient, Alluring, Relevant, and Shareable.

Convenient; people take the least line of resistance and, therefore, if your marketing messaging isn’t really accessible, and really convenient for people, they won’t go out of their way to find it.

Alluring; it’s got to capture your target market’s imagination.

Make them aspirational.

Make it desirable.

If it doesn’t capture their imagination, they’re likely to ignore it.

Relevance; is absolutely key.

You can have the best offer in the world, but if it’s irrelevant at the time, people won’t take you up on it.

Sending me an offer on a mobile phone, the day after I’ve renewed my contract, will just get dismissed and thrown away.

And Shareable; we live in a social world, and actually your customers today are another channel to market.

There’s nothing more credible than when a friend of yours sends you something that they’re interested in with no skin in the gate and, therefore, the more shareable you can make your material, the wider hits you’ll have.

So before you ship it, do your CARS and save your sanity and your reputation.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English