Earlier this month London based-blogger Jaclyn Craig reviewed a car, the Peugeot 108, on her blog bumpkinbetty.com. Entitled "Spending a week with the Peugeot 108", her review described in lively, fun detail her experience of the car, how comfortable it is, how spacious ("it's like a Tardis!") and how smart-looking ("it looks all kind of cute in an Instagram photo"). Job done.
But before you could say “good road-holding”, she was back in her blog, adding a preface, trying to calm some very irate Twitter petrolheads. And the reason: the 30-year-old Craig can’t drive.
She does say early in the piece, "I know nothing about cars. Nothing. No really, nothing whatsoever." Her new preface points out, "the 'review' aspects are taken from the thoughts of my husband, as a driver, and myself, as a lifestyle blogger."
Quick to back her up, Peugeot rolled into the debate, complete with old-school emoticon, tweeting: “Thanks to @BumpkinBetty for the blog post. We quite agree that you can review aspects of a car without having to be the driver :).”
What her detractors couldn’t quite grasp – but what every marketer trying to get their hands into the Loewe handbag of the clued-in urban professional knows – is that lifestyle blogs have earned their place in the marketing mix. While I am absolutely sure no one read the bumpkinbetty blog and thought, ‘that’s it – I’m off to buy a 108’, from the brand’s point of view, it succeeded in positioning its nippy city car in a blog environment (a common strategy for car brands) that has a cool tone of voice.
The Peugeot 108 has been widely reviewed by the motoring press – people who can actually drive – so that information is there for car shoppers. And in a fragmented media environment, even on a site that is a tiny star in the vast blogosphere (Bumpkin Betty has just 1,970 followers on Twitter), the coverage reinforces brand positioning.
Last year Debrett's list of the 500 most influential people in Britain listed Zoe Sugg alongside instantly familiar names such as Stephen Fry and David Beckham. With her 10 million YouTube followers, Zoella, as she is known to her (mostly teenage girl) fans, is a vlogger whose lifestyle and beauty tips and tutorials are to the sale of lipsticks and face scrubs what Oprah's Book Club was to paperbacks – they drive them through the roof. Zoella's online fans like and trust her, and that's what sells.
In 2011, a survey by US blogging site Blogher, conducted by Nielsen, found that 20 per cent of adult female social media users are encouraged to buy products if they are promoted by a blogger they know. Not a celebrity, just someone whose blog they follow for whatever reason.
The survey also found that almost half of US blog readers look to them for information on new trends, and 35 per cent used them as a source for finding new products. It is easy to get all sneery about a car review written by a non-driver because, while we readily buy into so many channels of car marketing – most notably product placement in movies – we do seem to have rather fixed views of what a car review should contain.
Do they really all have to be technically-minded, especially when those details might not be front of mind in buyers’ thinking about what car they might fancy? Car shows on TV tend to be puzzlingly male-oriented, as if women don’t drive or buy cars, or are in any way involved in the household purchasing decisions, when all survey evidence says they are a major factor in precisely such decisions.
It is worth remembering that people choose a particular car for a bewilderingly vast range of reasons – anything from it being the make their father drove to the technical lowdown on C02 emissions and everything in between. Once again this year, the annual JD Power survey of why new car buyers chose a particular car listed the number one reason as “reliability”. It’s not the sexiest of messages to try to get across. And how reliable a car is is built up in a consumer’s mind from a range of sources (and just as easily undermined by a news report of a recall.)
So whether petrolheads like it or not, there is scope for a different way of getting the message out there – even to those interested in the humble opinion of a non-driver.
