"We go further so you can."
That's the Ford brand promise. To express this, we created an online video series that brings to life how Ford owners, dealers, and employees do indeed go further every day to make the world a better place. The series is called "Ford Everyday Heroes."
The stories told include a Ford truck owner in Camden, New Jersey who started a drum and dance corp. to keep kids off the meanest streets of America, a Ford dealership full of volunteer firefighters who drop everything on the job to take care of emergencies, to an inner-city reverend who started a business that turns discarded tires into flip-flops – employing the homeless (enabling them to get off the streets due to steady work). These Ford owners are everyday heroes who give big when it comes to giving back.
The Ford Everyday Hero Stories focus on making Ford more relevant to a class of optimistic, forward-looking people. The stories expressed the company's shared values, by adding humanity and greater meaning to our brand promise in an authentic way by showing the world how our owners, dealers, and employees really do Go Further to make the world a better, more interesting, and more vibrant place.
To do this, we identified our heroes, researched their stories, interviewed, filmed and released a video almost every other week, creating a total of 29 videos
To increase amplification we sought out contextually relevant content partners to develop custom integrations with co-created content. Partners like the New York Times and the online TakePart (http://www.takepart.com/grow-to-give)
And then to give our videos a sense of timeliness we carefully monitored the social calendar and timed promotions to coincide where these videos could make the largest impact. For example, during Autism Awareness month we promoted Surfers Healing a surfing camp for autistic children and released Chasing Storms at the beginning of the tornado season in the U.S.
To date, these Everyday Hero stories have generated over 8 million impressions and over 13 million video views, changing the perception of Ford by causing 1.4 million consumers to think more favorably of the brand, four times our original goal. Additionally, we have increased the association between Ford and our brand promise of Go Further by 165%, three times our goal. And more than doubled our 3% goal of influencing consumers to actively seek out additional Ford content with a 7% rate of influence.
