Auto Makers Sport Green Hue

As consumers fret about the economic recession, North American marketers have taken to selling everything from Pepsi to pecan ice cream by repurposing Barack Omaba's message of hope and change.

It's no surprise that close-to-flatlining car companies have embraced the optimism with a particular vigor. But rather than shading hope in the blues and reds of the now ubiquitous Omaba pop-art poster, auto marketing is sporting a distinctly green hue this year as carmakers race to bring eco-friendly vehicles to market.

The Detroit auto show last month was a paean to the green car, showcasing electric, hybrid, diesel and small-engine technologies. The embattled Big Three promised a spate of green vehicles, with GM -- which had driven a caravan of its Vue hybrid vehicles to Washington as part of its 'Road to Change' tour -- launching 14 alone.

Ford announced updates of the hybrid Flex and Fusion models and vowed to have its smaller, fuel-saving Ecoboost engines in all cars by 2013. Chrysler launched three electric concept cars but did not give a production date. Audi, BMW and Volkswagen's models focused on clean diesel.

But will any of them will be able to catch up to the marketing advantage of Toyota Motor Corp.?

"If I were to ask, 'Who makes the most durable white appliances?' most people would say Maytag, because they built it first in the consumers' mind, even if the [brand] might not be the one that Consumer Reports puts at the top of its lists," said Ken Wong, marketing professor at Queen's University.

"Toyota has been able to secure the first-mover advantage with Prius," the hybrid vehicle first introduced in 1997, and that might not bode well as a glut of companies with an array of differing green technologies begin competing in earnest this year to gain consumers' attention with similar messages of earth-friendly change, he said.

"When you start to get hybrids competing against electrics competing against hydrogen, it's going to start getting confusing. If consumers get confounded with too much information they will go to the brand that they trust. A consumer looking for a green car might never get to another dealer [beyond Toyota]."

Toyota has been selling the message of bettering the planet in tandem with its new car technology for more than a year. In a recent campaign running on Canadian specialty channels, Toyota outlines a vision of the future in an ad reminiscent of a self-improvement tome that devotes very little time to showing its cars.

The commercial shows vignettes of a boy practicing on a soccer field, a woman asking a man to dance and a father closing his cell phone in order to pay attention to his daughter. "Be less discouraged, more determined," says a voiceover. "Less timid, more brave; less distracted more present; less wasteful, more environmental; less me, more we. We ask a lot of ourselves. Shouldn't we ask as much of our cars?" It eventually segues into shots of plug-in hybrids and engineers working on vehicle safety features.

Toyota also continues to show an older ad for the hybrid luxury vehicle Lexus H, which lists things the letter H stands for, such as habitat, human and humility. It shows shots of planet earth, a landfill site, a wind farm, a seagull covered in oil, people picking up garbage, tiny tree growing up out of a green landscape, a whale in water and sunlight pouring through a forest. Ultimately, "H is for hope," the ad says.

Ford Canada got a lot of attention last year for a nature-loving 2008 Escape Hybrid ad shot deep in a British Columbia forest, which depicted the vehicle driving so silently by a group of deer that the animals don't appear to notice. "That ad set a new benchmark for us in terms of our tracking -- consumers really loved that ad and connected with it, so we ran it all last year," said Dean Stoneley, vice-president of marketing at Ford Canada, which first introduced the Escape Hybrid in 2004.

Ford, which will promote its Fusion hybrid as the most fuel-efficient midsize sedan in the world, will start a new round of ads in March to promote the vehicles before cars hit the dealerships in April, he said.

Whether change and hope prove to be a way to market new cars to nervous consumers, people clearly want a more sustainable form of transportation, said Stephen Beatty, managing director at Toyota Canada Inc., adding it is inevitable that other big automakers are trying to roll out more sustainable vehicles as quickly as possible.

"There has been a shift in consumer attitude and I think people are looking for companies and products that are pledging to making progress in that area," he said. "But it really has to ring true. Consumers are very savvy. They will see through any 'let's pretend' positioning around environmental and social messaging."

Stoneley agreed.

 "There has been a fundamental shift, and the awareness around fuel economy wont go away [even as gas prices ease]," he said. "I think there is a sea change among consumers." The company has also put a renewed effort into ramping up an environmental component on its Ford.ca web site.

What eco-friendly vehicles succeed depends not just on marketing but on the weight consumers give to green benefits compared with price and other benefits, Mr. Wong said.

"We really don't know yet how the consumer is going to evaluate environmentalism and sustainability," he said. "Will it be based on value? Convenience because I have to plug [some models] in at places? And how much will they worry about reliability when a model is new?"