KIA: journeys
KIA is a hugely successful South Korean car manufacturer. Launched in the UK with a market-leading 7-year warranty, it quickly built a reputation for creating decent cars at low prices.
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KIA had built brilliant financial success, but with a fundamental shift in design and quality of its manufacturing, it wanted to elevate its brand to become a more premium competitor than the ‘squeezed middle’ of volume car sellers.
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In a market famous for the ‘pretty good’ problem, a lack of brand appeal can harm sales, resale values and customer retention. The product is brilliant: our job was to show people that the brand more than matches up too.
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Car brands do best when they forge an emotional connection. For KIA, this meant showing that it is there for every journey in life that matters.
Most cars share the same silhouette, features, even the same OEM parts. So differentiation is an increasing problem. Fundamentally, it’s hard to buy a ‘rubbish’ car these days. So how does Kia stand out?
Clearly, it didn’t. Despite creating a superior product the difference in sales and resale values came from a lack of brand value. The Kia Stinger (above) is a classic case in point: the model was launched by Kia as a sporting GT model to have a ‘brand halo’ effect on the rest of the range. It didn’t work.
At the same time, cars are not the same kind of ‘tool’ as, say, a washing machine or lawn mower. We form deep attachments to our cars, make them part of the family – even name them.
When we unpacked this attachment it was clear that cars become beloved because they share emotional journeys with us. They were there to get us to the hospital on time, or to leave home to go to university.
By focusing on Kia not as a tool that gets you from A to B but as a partner who joins you on life’s journeys – the journeys that really matter – we could help build that brand attachment.
The work:
Over the course of two years I produced scripts for two short films (published on Sky and on YouTube) and multiple articles in digital, print, and social media. A selection of the work is below.
UNSAID
UNSAID, a fictional short film starring James Hillier and Mary McCusker, focuses on the distant relationship between an architect and his aged mother.
UNSAID was directed by Ben Falk and filmed over four days in Edinburgh and its surroundings. The 12-minute film was launched on YouTube, The Times online and on Sky’s onDemand platform. It was promoted via bespoke 30sec adverts across all platforms.
Mudlumps
To get the kids off their tablets a young dad livens up a long journey with fabulous tales about the mudlumps: little creatures that live in the forests.
Mudlumps was directed by Cris Mudge and filmed in West Sussex. Animated elements were created by Bewilder, a South African animation agency.
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Consideration
Consideration of Kia’s model range increased significantly as a result of the campaign. Across the range consideration increased over 4 times the original amount, while for the Kia Optima it specifically increased by over 1500%.
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Brand love
Kia’s brand sentiment scores (Innocean 2017-2019) tracked Kia as increasing by seven percentage points over the campaign, pushing it above rivals Volvo for the first time in brand tracking scores.
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Time spent
The campaign punched well above its weight with viewing figures of more than 200,000 views of the UNSAID film on YouTube. The average viewing time was over 7 minutes, with more than 53% of the audience watching the entire film.
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Liftoff
Overall the campaign contributed a significant 7% sales increase of Kia’s models. 87 participants in our post-campaign research told us they had bought a Kia directly as a result of the campaign, with car sales worth £2.2m.