Lightning could be way cheaper if less marketing / advertisements

[jazzmanmonty]

Anyone else notice how many commercial spots Ford bought for yesterdays football games? It seemed like every other break had a lightning commercial in it. Yet Ford (knowing they have around 200k reservations = about three years worth of orders) still thinks it's a good idea to spend millions to push it on t.v. like you can go buy one tomorrow. You can't reserve one anymore! You're not gonna suddenly make a million of them. What's the point? Word has already been out about this truck for a long time.

Last year during NFC championship game it cost $2 mil for each 30 second ad. Just gives you an idea of how much Ford dished out.

Ford should have saved their damn advertizing money spent on these ads and instead lowered the pricing of the truck, battery upgrades, or smaller price gaps between trim levels.

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[rxn]

It's called brand sentiment (or greenwashing, in the case of EVs/green tech). Companies waste tons of money to make you "feel good" about the brand, and hey maybe if you went to your Ford dealer and they told you it's sold out for 2+ years maybe they can sell you on a hybrid F-150 instead, or one of their other vehicles.

Sadly I'm beginning to understand that the same goes for the "$40k" Pro model, it's most likely going to be in perpetual short supply with no plans to change production based on demand, it's probably a loss leader and always was planned to be, with the profit being made with all the higher models.

 

[sotek2345]

I would guess those slots were purchased well on advance, before Ford new how much demand they had.

You also have corporate culture to deal with. Marketing department has to do something!

 

[IdeaOfTheDayCom]

...Ford should have saved their damn advertizing money spent on these ads and instead lowered the pricing of the truck, battery upgrades, or smaller price gaps between trim levels.

Tesla NEVER advertises... Ever. They get most of their product awareness by word of mouth and through social media. The only thing close to advertising is their presence at trade shows and placing their showrooms in popular shopping malls.

Ditto for quite a few brands that claim to "sell themselves", yet other brands like Budweiser, McDonalds, Coke and Pepsi advertise so often you see them dozens of times each day.

One thing heavy advertisers have in common is that many of them don't sell directly to customers and advertising is a requirement of their distribution agreements.

If car makers eventually ditch the traditional dealership model, they would have a lot more flexibility.

 

[RickLightning]

@rxn is the only one that gets it, sort of (waste is not the right word).

Ford has the best selling vehicle in America, period, the F-150. That brand (F-150) has tremendous goodwill and loyalty associated with it. Nothing like the paltry Tesla loyalty, this is loyalty across decades and generational. People that buy F-150s would never buy a GM product if it was made out of gold.

Ford, correctly, is spending money to both build on the excitement about this product (notice who's at the front of the list - Arnold, The Rock, Jay Leno - and will keep doing so, and should. They need their EV push to carry them higher than GM, both companies have bet the farm on EVs.

In 2021, Tesla sold 936,000 vehicles. Ford sold 726,000 F-150s. That's down from 900,000 pre-pandemic. The intersection of Tesla owners/potential owners, and F-150 owners, has a huge area where there is no overlap. In other words, the potential market for the Lightning is much bigger than the potential market for Teslas.

Ford is correctly spending lots of money on its EV advertising. The total corporate marketing budget is close to $2B, this is nothing.

 

[LightningShow]

@rxn is the only one that gets it, sort of (waste is not the right word).

Ford has the best selling vehicle in America, period, the F-150. That brand (F-150) has tremendous goodwill and loyalty associated with it. Nothing like the paltry Tesla loyalty, this is loyalty across decades and generational. People that buy F-150s would never buy a GM product if it was made out of gold.

Ford, correctly, is spending money to both build on the excitement about this product (notice who's at the front of the list - Arnold, The Rock, Jay Leno - and will keep doing so, and should. They need their EV push to carry them higher than GM, both companies have bet the farm on EVs.

In 2021, Tesla sold 936,000 vehicles. Ford sold 726,000 F-150s. That's down from 900,000 pre-pandemic. The intersection of Tesla owners/potential owners, and F-150 owners, has a huge area where there is no overlap. In other words, the potential market for the Lightning is much bigger than the potential market for Teslas.

Ford is correctly spending lots of money on its EV advertising. The total marketing budget is close to $2B, this is nothing.

Mostly agree here. Tesla is a special case, they are just getting to the point of having to compete with the big boys for real market share. It has nothing to do with loyalty, it has to do with the fact that Tesla has a functional monopoly in the EV market, at least until pretty recently. You can bank on the fact that they *will* eventually have advertising just like every other car company. They have been almost completely alone in the EV market since their inception, everyone already associates Tesla with EVs. It's a mostly non-competitive situation. They haven't needed advertising for consumers to associate their brand with their product (EVs).

Now, Ford probably doesn't *need* to advertise the Lightning heavily because they are also the only game in town in EV full size trucks but Ford already has a huge marketing department and people with the competency to generate ads, so it was easy for them. Still, this is not a "waste", it's part of the competitive process for consumer goods. If Ford stopped advertising, it wouldn't make their trucks cheaper. They'd probably get more expensive because they'd lose market share and need to make up for lower volume...and no other company would lower their price so they'd just price competitively anyway. Just because a company spends money on something doesn't mean the price goes down if they stopped spending money on that thing. It's much more complicated than that.

EDIT: I'll add that the lack of advertising by Rivian and Lucid is actually hurting their brands right now. They are trying to be like Tesla but it doesn't work when you're 10 years late to the party. Plus Tesla has a superstar celebrity at the helm of the company. Musk, alone, generates more brand recognition than the marketing departments of most Fortune 500 companies. You can't buy what Musk does in terms of brand recognition.

EDIT2: I don't know how much advertising Rivian and Lucid are actually doing, I just don't recall seeing any.

 

[greenne]

@rxn is the only one that gets it, sort of (waste is not the right word).

....
Ford, correctly, is spending money to both build on the excitement about this product (notice who's at the front of the list - Arnold, The Rock, Jay Leno - and will keep doing so, and should. They need their EV push to carry them higher than GM, both companies have bet the farm on EVs.
....

Ford is correctly spending lots of money on its EV advertising. The total corporate marketing budget is close to $2B, this is nothing.

There is another reason and that is politics. Ford is lobbying hard for expanded EV credits. More EV credits= more sales= more profit. This is less about the f150 Lightning and more about generating excitement about EVs and tax credits to sell the upcoming Explorer EV, the Bronco EV, and whatever else Ford decides to roll out in the next 3-5yrs.

Ford is playing the long game just as much as the short term sales game. They know corporate donors are watching and hopefully will push for a BBB (or stand alone EV credit).

We can only hope....

 

[jefro]

I'd hate to think about all those advertising people out of work. They are not able to do any other job for the most part. On top of that all the newspaper people and magazine as well as direct mail. All up in smoke if people like Ford made a better mousetrap in the forest.

 

[Carminus]

Marketing was a drop in the bucket compared to what they spent on R&D, factory upgrades and let's not forget the 25 billion dollar battery factory they are building with sk.

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