There is no doubt in my mind that Nissan’s Cube Minicar is one of the worst looking cars I have ever set eyes upon. Technically the car isn’t even a cube but it was the focus behind an ingenious Canadian PR Campaign. My tutor, David Phillips, has been put on the record for controversially announcing that “marketing is dead”. During the summer of 2009 this mantra appeared to be true for Nissan.

During the promotional period for the Nissan Cube ‘excuse me whilst I be sick’ Minicar all traditional media was avoided. Not a word was spoken on the radio, television was devoid of Cube Minicar adverts, no billboards advertisements and certainly no newspaper inches were used. Instead the PR campaign involved purely using social media.

The structure of the campaign was simple. Nissan ran a ‘Hypercube’ contest which was aimed at the creative classes in Canada. The aim of this contest was to get people to draw pictures personifying the Cube brand. Thousands entered the competition, this was narrowed down to 500 people and eventually a top 50 were selected. These “lucky” individuals received a free Cube Minicar.

The campaign touched over 5 million potential customers and generated extra publicity for the celebrities, musicians and artists who got involved.

There is a fallacy that social media is a cheap effective way to promote. It might be effective if done well but it is never cheap. The amount of time it takes to monitor social network profiles costs a lot of time. Keeping this in consideration Nissan Canada saved a lot of money by keeping away from mainstream media communication channels.

So is it possible to run an effective social media campaign avoiding traditional communication mediums? Yes.

Should everybody promote purely using social media? No. It is too risky.

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