Today I learnt that 5% of Mercedes drivers have 2 or more Tattoos. Well 5% of the 450 people in the UK they surveyed anyway.

How do I know this?

Lucky me, Mercedes have targeted me as a prospect. Which means I get a personalised piece of DM through the post aimed at getting me to visited http://site.iammercedes-benz.co.uk, a site that tells me facts about Mercedes drivers.

39% have blue eyes, so what…

Whilst there are some nice graphics and a few interesting ways of displaying survey data, I don’t get why this information is relevant to me as a prospect customer.

As well as displaying lifestyle data, the site does make an attempt to convey something about their cars, but unfortunately gets very dull by telling me about peoples average millage or preferred paint colour.

In my mind Mercedes have missed a trick. Firstly, this is still very much a one-way monologue from Mercedes. The site doesn’t encourage two-way dialogue, or try to establish anything about me the prospect.

Secondly, this would have been a great opportunity for Mercedes Drivers to express how they FEEL, not just what the ARE.

A great example of this is www.wefeelfine.org/

We Feel Fine automatically scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. It then presents the information back in really interesting and exciting ways, that make you want to explore the information and why people feel the way they do.

The other big advantage with this site is it updates automatically every ten minutes. It saves between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day rather than relying on static survey data that has a limited shelf life.

I guess the only problem with that approach is Mercedes being confident that their drivers FEEL good about driving a Mercedes.