Background

The HR-V model was 18 months old. Initial sales had been strong, however supply issues meant that stock ran out and marketing stopped. A few months after stock returned, demand was still flat and Honda was falling further behind their sales targets each month.

whiteGREY was engaged to develop a performance media campaign on Meta to drive a short-term uplift in HR-V consideration, leads and sales – supported by new retail offers for each HR-V model. We were asked to target prospects considering other brands to prevent ZR-V cannibalisation.

Tension

When the HR-V is a bit of an unknown that at first glance doesn’t seem to stack-up against or ‘fit in’ alongside the competition, how can we intercept consideration by trading off a different evaluation criterion – and so make not ‘fitting in’ a reason to stand out?

Approach

whiteGREY developed a campaign based around Honda’s relentless pursuit of improvement through continuous design, engineering and operational efficiency, combined with their desire to deliver joy to their drivers. We made efficiency emotive by making it a source of pride, that is used to create joy for Honda drivers.

We ran a 1-day photo shoot, during which we captured 24 static images and 24 individual films, which we turned into 39 Meta assets.

We then built a full funnel marketing approach to create broad awareness, nurture HR-V appeal and generate demand through in-platform lead gen activity, that drove strong results across the entire funnel.

Impact

The campaign was initially schedule to run for 2 months, but this was extended to 4 months due to its success. We delivered 350% of the leads target at under half the CPL target, along with over 92,000 website visits which helped nurture prospects.

Most impressively, after multiple months of missed targets, the HR-V petrol variant sold out within 4 weeks of starting the campaign.