Nissan Changes Course, Shows Off Infiniti : Marketing: Dealers complained that ads were showing too much nature and not enough car.
Sticks and stones may break your bones, but dealers of Infiniti luxury cars question whether they sell cars very well.
In meetings earlier this month, the dealers complained about the company’s Zen-like series of advertisements featuring peaceful woods, rock gardens and placid lakes--but precious few shots of the mysterious auto.
Partly as a result, Nissan Motor Corp.’s Infiniti and its advertising agency suddenly switched gears Wednesday, unveiling the car with a vengeance in two-page advertisements in major daily newspapers across the country.
The ads, which ran in The Times, the New York Times and other major metropolitan dailies, featured not one but 15 photographs of the new Infiniti Q45 luxury sedan.
No woods. No rocks. No lakes.
“I brought it in today, and all the salesmen gathered around it, and everybody was pleased,” said Robert Nesen, who co-owns an Infiniti dealership in Thousand Oaks.
Nesen and other dealers said they liked the earlier rock garden ads because they created curiousity about the name. But enough is enough.
“How long can you tease them?” asked Chuck Castagna, general manager of Carmen Koosa’s Infiniti dealership in Santa Fe Springs. “The car is out. Every other manufacturer is showing their vehicles. It’s time we showed ours.”
Officials at Infiniti were off for the holidays and could not be reached Wednesday.
But Chuck Kushell, who runs Infiniti’s advertising agency in Marina del Rey, said the switch was not unplanned--despite printed statements just last week that the way the car looks would rank a distant second behind the philosophy of its design.
“One of the things we’ve never said is that we would never put the car in our ads,” said Kushell, who is executive vice president and general manager of Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos Inc.’s local office, which handles Infiniti’s $60-million advertising account.
“What you’re seeing, in effect, is the beginning of the second phase of our advertising,” he added. “In the first phase, we established the brand. . . . Now, we’re adding a second layer with this phase, which is very product specific. But it’s important to point out that the first phase never stops.”
Infiniti began advertising its two luxury models last month with national television, magazine and newspaper ads in an innovative campaign that drew some criticism from ad industry competitors.
A second series of ads, featuring photos of Infiniti’s other model, the M30 sports coupe, will appear in newspapers within the next week, Kushell added.
Radio spots will follow. New Infiniti television ads will appear after the first of the year, but they will have fewer product shots and will continue the nature images, he said.
Some dealers said Wednesday that Infiniti apparently moved up its schedule of product-oriented ads after dealers asked for more shots of the car.
Kushell dismissed such speculation. “The timing of this campaign was planned well over a year ago,” he said. “We did meet with the dealers a couple of weeks ago and talked about the first four weeks of the launch.
And one thing dealers always say is that they want more product advertising. As it happens, their requests were directly in line with where we were going anyway.”
Infiniti’s sales are believed to be lagging behind those of rival Toyota’s Lexus luxury models, which debuted weeks before Infiniti, said Christopher Cedergren, senior automotive analyst with J. D. Power & Associates, an auto market research firm in Agoura Hills. Infiniti won’t release initial sales figures until after the first of the year.
