GE is taking its show on the road – literally – with a cross-country bus tour to promote its small business lending program. It’s a brilliant adaptation of old tactics for a new-media age.
Part election campaign, part old-fashioned media tour, GE began a multi-city road trip – complete with a specially outfitted bus – to drum up business for its middle-market finance business. As the New York Times explained:
“The “Roadshow for Growth” entails a bus tour through various cities across the United States. After Kansas City, it moves on to St. Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York, Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles, among others. It will end in Columbus, Ohio, in late October.
“At each stop, the roadshow will host different events, like town hall discussions, conversations with the city’s mayor, and visits with middle-market businesses. In Kansas City on Monday, for example, there was a meeting with Mayor Sly James and a town hall session with GE Capital employees, while the Chicago visit on Thursday is to include a discussion moderated by Jacob Weisberg, chairman of the Slate Group, and featuring Mayor Rahm Emanuel and economist Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the first term of the Obama administration.”
The GE roadshow capitalizes on several trends. The first is the importance of local media as a means of reaching consumers and small businesses. The past several years have been brutal for national media as readers and advertisers scattered to digital sites and social media. By contrast, local news organizations have done a pretty good job of adapting to this new world, and they remain a vital news source in many communities. Audiences for local television, for example, rose last year, and many stations are adding staff, according to the Pew Research Center.
Coverage in local media outlets is precisely what GE is looking for as its tour visits small towns around the country. A big colorful bus and an upbeat message is ideal for local television.
GE is also making skillful use of original content, like blogs, as well as native advertising – customized editorial features that reside next to traditional news content on digital sites. It can be highly targeted to locations and reader interests. With this as well as local news coverage, self-produced content, the GE road show will be hard to miss when it comes to your town.
This is a great example of intelligent risk-taking when it comes to marketing. There’s certainly risk in what GE is doing. It’s a costly program, even for a company that spends many millions on marketing annually. It’s also going straight into the heartland, where suspicions of large companies run deep. GE CEO Jeff Immelt isn’t too popular in Red States either, thanks to his involvement in President Obama’s jobs council.
But for all the risk, GE stands to gain quite a lot.
In simple business terms, its campaign could generate a torrent of loan inquiries and applications. That’s valuable data for pitching a host of products, and GE knows how to do it very well.
The GE campaign will also help the company make friends in Washington, where most banks can’t point to much progress on their small-business lending.
But GE also stands to reap a substantial and long-lasting marketing benefit if it can transform its brand from being a big, faceless conglomerate to a reliable, local lender to small businesses. It’s poised to grab customers from traditional banks that are tightening credit standards and becoming more selective about new customers, in part because of new financial regulations.
Regional banking executives should be very worried. GE is run more efficiently than they are, enjoys a stronger credit rating (and thus lower funding costs) and, with a few exceptions, has a better brand. They will need effective communication and marketing strategies to avoid being flattened by GE’s big bus.