Chevrolet is taking some lessons from its interns as well. With people of color accounting for nearly half of GM employees while holding only 30% of company leadership positions, Chevrolet CMO Steve Majoros found that HBCU students contributed as much to the DTU program as they benefited from it.
“It exposes us to people who have, perhaps, a different life experience and mindset,” Majoros said. “It gives them exposure to the fact that, perhaps, big, monolithic companies aren’t so unapproachable, and are pretty dynamic places.”
No free ride
As Chapman noted of DTU, there’s a product baked right into the program.
This year, Chevrolet tasked its Fellows with selling the newly launched, roughly $20,000 Trax as a starter vehicle for students and graduates. The students targeted alumni in the market for cars, looked at brand lift and marked sales. They never took a straightforward, hard sales approach pitching price or payment plans, but they offered their view from inside the vehicle.
While Chevrolet wouldn’t share sales numbers attached to the DTU program, it noted that a big reason it has endured for the better part of a decade is “cultural capital.” Chapman and his team track online engagement from DTU fellows’ posts, they cull data from the NNPA website on content views, they see how it reaches a secondary audience and compare its effectiveness with previous campaigns—like the 2022 DTU program centered around the Chevy Bolt EV.
“I can’t go in to our CMO and just say, ‘Hey, this makes you feel good,’” Chapman said. “You have to have metrics.”
