The Ford Fiesta Movement, a unique product launch campaign of its time, broke all rules of traditional marketing and became a pioneer in the automobile industry with the use of viral marketing.
Ford Motors had an excellent strategy combining genuine content and perfect timing. While other companies created commotion for unnecessary expenditures during financial turmoil, Ford Motors leveraged on the low costs of its non-traditional campaign to construct a responsible image, while simultaneously sharing an authentic message.
The campaign was successful because it went beyond the traditional advertising bombardment. Ford carefully selected its target audience (millennials) and reached out to them by entering their most influential channels of communication – Social Media. Furthermore, instead of filling it with in-house advertisement, Ford recruited “Agents” to create consumer-generated material that millennials could relate to. It appears agents were recruited following basic principles of Malcolm Gladwell’s, “The Tipping Point”. They were popular, convincing, tech-savvy, and most importantly, already well established in online social networks.
The success of the campaign should be measured not only by the number of followers it achieved, but also by the engagement it created. Comparing the number of fresh interactions generated each month would show the present-day interest of users. Metrics like mentions, retweets, likes, number of clicks, shares, new subscribers, etc. are