Wow, I guess the negative comments from the Honda Crosstour really wounded the mighty Honda's self-perception. Their latest foray into social media marketing is a new Facebook application called "Who Loves a Honda?" that they are advertising on the Facebook site. It asks people to say they love a Honda and/or to send a notice to someone they think also loves a Honda.
The application is a "love chain" (Honda's words, not mine) counting how many people you are connected to who love Honda, the age of the oldest Honda, and the number of Honda lovers connected to your profile. All of this creates a massive amount of "Honda Love" that as of this evening reached over a half a million across Facebook. Maybe a half a million votes of love will
make Honda feel better after all those awful things people said about their Accord Crosstour? Or is a million or 5 million the right number?Other than spreading the word about Honda, the Facebook application does nothing else. It is basically a way to identify oneself as a lover of the Honda brand, which by the way is the whole point of being a "fan" of a brand on Facebook. Seems to me just having a decent count of fans on the social network would be a good enough way to measure brand love. The 22,000 plus fans just wasn't enough considering Ford has over 40,000 and General Motors over 120,000. This application Honda created is their way of getting people to really prove it, as their ad pathetically asks "help us prove it".
Self-doubt is really unattractive and really who likes to hangout with someone constantly asking for acknowledgment of your love. The "Who loves a Honda" application provides no consumer value beyond what a typical "Become a Fan" does. In fact it does less, at least when you fan a brand you get notified of updates, but this application just let's you prove your love like bringing flowers home after saying or doing something wrong to your spouse. Now that they have received some public love on Facebook after their Accord Crosstour fiasco, can we all move on and sing kumbaya, because this is getting weird.
