SAFETY SELLS
June 20, 2008 – 6:01 amAnother example:Volvo Cars. The reason I am in advertising. Quick quiz: Ask an American to describe, in one word, what he or she most associates with Volvo.
Donald Sutherland? (The veteran actor does the voice-overs for our Volvo commercials, which is a good thing to know if you’re playing Trivial Pursuit, but it’s not the answer most people would give.)
The answer is safety—a value that has become synonymous with the brand. Because of that association, Volvo has attained a position as one of the most potent brands in the world.
Today, safety is more than ever a primary consideration when buying a car. Checking out crash-test ratings is de rigueur for most buyers. But back in the late 1950s, when the first Volvo touched American soil, selling cars based on safety was considered a highly unmarketable idea.
Ford knew that. It had tried using safety features—padded dashboards and recessed steering wheels—as a selling point. The result? In 1956, Chevrolet outsold Ford by a wide margin. The experiment was a colossal failure. Hey, it was America in the 1950s—who cared about safety?
Enter Gunnar Engellau, the CEO of Volvo Cars at the time. In 1957, outside of the United States, Volvo was already considered a leader in safety innovations. Back in 1944, it had begun installing laminated windshields in all its vehicles to prevent flying shards of glass in the event of an accident. Some 15 years later, this became a legal requirement in the United States. Volvo also was already boasting a two-point diagonal safety belt. But that safety belt proved to have serious shortcomings. A colleague of Gunnar Engellau had been in an accident and was thrown from his car and seriously injured, despite the fact that he had been wearing the diagonal belt. That accident ignited a passion in Engellau that would ultimately shape the future of Volvo. As the man recruited to solve the problem remembers it, “Engellau called me up to his office and demanded a better solution. He was not the sort of person you say no to.”4
That man was a brilliant engineer by the name of Nils Bohlin, who was then working in the Swedish aviation industry and would go on to become Volvo’s head of safety engineering. By 1959, because of Engellau’s passion for safety and his willingness to take a risk and make a leap that flew in the face of U.S. marketplace trends, Volvo became the first car company anywhere to offer three-point seatbelts. Engellau’s decision to build a car brand on safety is a Creative Business Idea that is still influencing Volvo’s business strategy more than four decades later. And it proved the naysayers wrong: Safety does sell.
Taken from : “Leap” A Revolution in Creative Business Strategy
