Performance Communications | October 4, 2017
Sometimes ideas come as a lightbulb moment. Sometimes they need to be dragged out kicking and screaming. Sometimes the idea is so blindingly obvious you can’t understand how it hasn’t been done already. Some ideas are a mixture of all of the above. Our X-Trail 4Dogs for Nissan was one such campaign.
The lightbulb moment that 30% of our target audience had a dog sparked off some heavyweight research with The Kennel Club that told us that our customers care so much about their four legged friends, that they would buy a car that boasts dog-friendly features. All of this insight made the final idea so obvious as to feel like it must have been done before – we created the world’s first car specifically designed with dogs’ needs in mind.
We then created a concept car (that’s it to the left), tested it, filmed it, photographed it and did a traditional sell in. What happened next shouldn’t have surprised us, but it did. It went massive. The video views kept growing exponentially hitting 120 million+. Over 550 articles were written and the video was shared millions of times on Facebook. Brand opinion raised by 7% and on top of that, Google searches for Nissan X-Trail reached levels unseen since the car was launched! Demand for the dog pack reached such fever pitch that Nissan listened to customer feedback, and began production.
It went so well in fact that we’re incredibly pleased to announce that it was awarded Best Automotive Campaign at this year’s Masters Of Marketing.
You can watch a little roundup video of the campaign below, but here is what the judges said:
[testimonial author=”Masters of Marketing Judging Panel” description=””] “A great idea that started with a strategic idea, was proven via research that then became a winning campaign with some impressive results.” [/testimonial]
[testimonial author=”Simon Carter” description=”CEO of ComRes and judge on Masters of Marketing Awards”] “There were some interesting ideas (in this category) but there were also some pretty traditional ideas.
“We thought the 4Dogs campaign was a really interesting strategic idea that was carried through and delivered some great results against the objectives that they were seeking.
But perhaps the one reason that we all commented on was that traditionally automotive advertising tends to be very stereotypical and gender specific – and you can replace any old brand on any old picture of a car going round a hairpin brand somewhere.
“What this did was that it was very gender neutral and worked lovely across a number of audiences and really stood out as something different.” [/testimonial]
