I have been a huge fan of Honda for a long, long time. I think that is down to the quality of car they design & build but I also think part of it is down to the sheer quality of the adverts they make. For a good few years now I have admired the clever ideas used to promote the brand.
In an age where billions & billions of dollars are spent trying to get our attention, trying to get us to put our hand in our pockets, it takes a huge amount to stand out from the crowd. What impresses me the most about Honda is that their adverts very rarely appear to sell us anything at all. Sure, every commercial ends with the well known logo & slogan ‘Honda – The Power Of Dreams’ but I can’t recall an ad where the line ‘Price excludes delivery charges’ or ‘Car shown is top spec, alloys not included on base model’ is shown. Honda don’t get bogged down in the trench warfare that is car sales advertising.
Just by way of a couple of examples, here is an advert they did using car headlights . It has been said that this ad is fake, that all the images are CGi but even if that is the case, it still stands up as a great idea. But if it is not fake (and I think it’s not) then it is nothing short of genius in my opinion.
My favourite advert they have done, and I think it is a lot of people’s favourites, is ‘The Cog’. This 120 second long commercial was first aired during the Brazilian Grand Prix in April 2003. Due to the high cost of screening a commercial 120 seconds long, the full version has only been shown on TV a handful of times. We have posted this video up on our Facebook page a few times over the years and it always gets the same positive response. Here is the full, unedited video...
Yesterday evening, whilst surfing the web I came across Honda’s latest venture. ‘Good Reasons’ is a web based campaign focusing on Honda from six different angles - Fuel efficiency, Quality, Innovation, Value, Dependability & Safety. The website stars Patrick Warburton as our tour guide/host who guides us through all six videos, as well as some hilarious moments on the home screen. This would be considered to be more ‘Sales-ey’ than previous efforts but it is just such a clever use of technology, you don’t even seem to care. Here is the site in question, it is definitely worth 5 minutes of your time!
http://shophonda.com/goodreasons/?from=goodreasons.honda.com