Honda CR-Z 'Digital Brochure' Revs Possibilities

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American Honda Motor Co. nixed the glossy paper brochure for the CR-Z hybrid to go with an all-digital piece that allows consumers to interact with features and function on the car. The brochure doesn't look like a digital magazine, but a smooth, flowing multicolor interactive guide that prospective buyers can touch and feel.

Through a navigation bar at the bottom of the page, the brochure allows people to find a dealer, get a quote, gain expanded information on features and functions, customize the car color throughout the piece, share it with others, and run videos in the pages.

Honda's target market -- the twenty-somethings -- prefer a digital format rather than a paper brochure. Consumers can download the brochure onto an Apple iPad, mobile phone or desktop or laptop computer to interact with the cars. On the iPad, the brochure allows consumers to touch and swipe to interact with the features.

Tom Peyton, senior manager of National Advertising at American Honda Motor, expects the day will come when Honda will phase out paper brochures and provide only digital, but for now it's an experiment to find out whether age matters and some of the issues surrounding the elimination of paper. "It's not cheap to design this, but in the long run we should see efficiencies and economies of scale," he says.

Honda prints thousands of brochures that it sends to dealers for distribution to prospective consumers. It's an impossible task to get the exact amount correct. At the end of a model year across the automotive industry, thousands of brochures are thrown into a dumpster for recycling.

Consumers can easily download the CR-Z brochure from iTunes without providing too much information. "Asking consumers to jump over too many hurdles could cause them not to download the brochure," says Augie Ray, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "If people must register to download the brochure it might run counter to Honda's objectives."

Taking full advantage of the real estate and technological capabilities of iOS and interactive devices, eye-popping photography bleeds over to give consumers a personal experience of the CR-Z. Consumers can also see 360-degree car spins and interact with various hot spots to view animated features. Those who download the brochure need not provide additional information that the car manufacturers or dealers can use as leads, which could be a missed opportunity.

Chris Cedergren, managing partner at research firm Iceology, which specializes in marketing for automotive brands, believes research techniques routed back in the 1950s and 1960s don't work today because people have limited attention spans with greater expectations. They don't, however, want brands to follow them online via cookies and ad and browser tags. "We have a problem when companies collect data based on behavioral patterns across the Internet," he says. "We don't believe in spyware. More importantly, you're making too broad an assumption by following the customers to a Web site, thinking that's really what they like and where they want to go."

 

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