Last Saturday, Chevrolet chauffeured 17 L.A. food bloggers around the city to four top cupcake stores and treated them to cupcakes as part of its grassroots effort to reach out to the community. Just the week before the carmaker was at the University of Southern California campus during finals to shuttle 500 students in nine Equinoxes and Camaros to local fast-food restaurants, buying them "study-food" for a study break.
"Chevrolet Best of Tours is all about helping local residents discover the best that their city has to offer with fun rides to top hot spots in cool new Chevrolet vehicles, starting with cupcakes and expanding to other eateries, stores and activities," said Dave Barthmuss, General Motors Company group manager of Western Region, Environment & Energy Communications. "These tours will help to introduce Chevy products to local residents and influencers and provide them with a chance to experience our vehicles in a unique way."
When you're not selling cars to people, something must be done to make people like you. Chevrolet figures the thing to do is change people's minds one at a time, so like many other carmakers, it's using social media to do it, as you'll see on the "Best of Tours'" Twitter page and its Facebook profile.
For the "Best of Tours" L.A. cupcake tour, Chevy brought out four Equinoxes and one Transformer edition Camaro. But there weren't any presentations or hard sells about the cars, not even during the ride to the cupcake stores. Our chauffeurs weren't marketing people but rather those in charge of the press fleet, i.e. who deliver test cars to car journalists. The only time the car came up was at the end of the tour during the ride back when the driver demonstrated OnStar's turn-by-turn feature.
After the tour, we were each given gift bags. Again, the only shout-out to General Motors in the bag was a silver Tiffany keychain embossed with the GM logo.
We asked about the possibility of a cocktail tour as that would be the perfect way to make use of a designated driver and surprisingly Barthmuss seemed open to it so stay tuned.
Pictures of cupcakes after the jump.
(Left to right) Crumbs' Elvis, Sprinkles' red velvet, Susiecakes' gingerbread, Vanilla Bake Shop's toasted coconut dark chocolate.
canddmeyer says:
02:00 AM, 12/17/09
There are definitely a lot of cupcakes in that picture!
stephen987 says:
06:20 AM, 12/17/09
Unfortunately GM subsisted for too long by making the equivalent of cupcakes--superficially attractive but lacking substance and not satisfying over the long haul.
roadburner says:
07:08 AM, 12/17/09
If anyone needs more proof that GM's marketing strategy is in free-fall...
mrryte says:
08:11 AM, 12/17/09
"Chevrolet Best of Tours is all about helping local residents discover the best that their city has to offer with fun rides to top hot spots in cool new Chevrolet vehicles, starting with cupcakes and expanding to other eateries, stores and activities," said Dave Barthmuss, General Motors Company group manager of Western Region, Environment & Energy Communications.
Environment & Energy Communications? WTH?
Did Whitacre know about this marketing ploy beforehand?
felonious says:
09:18 AM, 12/17/09
So...? Which was the best cupcake? :)
compliance says:
09:31 AM, 12/17/09
I'm so over this style of marketing, and I can't stand these bloggers turned marketers popping up on line spitting out trite ad copy everywhere. Most recently in the mini E long term comments.
caroscuro says:
10:26 AM, 12/17/09
felonious,
Definitely the Hostess cupcake at Crumbs. And the Crumbs Elvis -- banana cake with vanilla frosting and some peanut butter -- was pretty tasty, too.