Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

The grooves are spaced so that a series of pitches play when a car drives over them at a particular speed; the Lancaster road was designed to play Rossini's famous William Tell Overture when a Honda Civic driving 55 mph traveled over it, but similar sounds came from cars of other weights and makes as well.

The marketing impetus for Honda was to showcase the Civic's fuel efficiency and gas mileage, not to mention separating it from the pack. Somewhat predictably, drivers felt compelled to drive over the grooves again and again, even going over them in reverse to see if the tune would play backwards. (It didn't.)

At least it was William Tell and not, say, Mozart's Requiem
(though Varèse's Ionisation would have been a fairly wild choice), but Lancaster residents found themselves being driven slowly crazy by the continuous repetition. A blog on Wired.com cited the episode as potentially the "Most Annoying Promotion Ever." All this led to Lancaster paving over the strips - a mere 18 days after Tell first started tooting.

Now comes word that Lancaster officials, pleased by all the media attention, are hoping to build another melody road somewhere else in town. Whether this will prove to be just as dismaying to other residents remains unclear, but the entire episode brings up a couple of questions:

1. Why are there apparently cultural differences between Japan and the U.S. when it comes to their roadways playing tunes?
2. How vital is market research when it comes to rolling something like this out? (Hint: Very.)
3. Anyone else have an example of an annoying promotion that should have been thought out better beforehand?