Gotta give Hyundai credit for seeing opportunity where most are seeing a lack of consumer confidence and wondering what to do next.

Let’s say you’re in the market for a car, but you’re not sure whether your job will be here in a year. But you need that car. Badly. But you’re really concerned. What to do?

Voila! Hyundai Assurance.

What’s it mean? It means if you wind up unemployed after you make that big-ticket purchase, you can return your new car and walk away from a negative-equity situation, cutting your losses by up to $7,500.

But it’s not just for unemployment. It also applies if you wind up declaring self-employed personal bankruptcy, face a physical disability, lose your driver’s license and several other scenarios. Here’s the press release about it.

Hyundai’s taking a negative and turning it into a positive … and, not incidentally, capitalizing on a real PR opportunity (look for plenty of business stories about this plan in the weeks ahead). That’s called smart marketing in a down economy.

Takeaway for marketers: Get into the heads of your potential customers.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 8:24 am and is filed under Marketing Stuff, Marketing Takeaways.