With ‘Challenge to Change’, we constructed a marketing campaign for Kia dealers that tackled head on people’s fears about trying a car brand that they perceived to be ‘budget.’ It encompassed a UK-wide press and radio campaign, showroom point of sale and a dealer personalized direct mail campaign. So, did it work? Well, from Kia’s point-of-view, resoundingly – dealer participation in the promotion was 22% above the average and year on year sales for the period of the promotion were up 30%, against a declining overall market.

After the huge success of the first Kia ‘Challenge to Change’ campaign, Kia were very keen to repeat the exercise later in 2008. After the public’s surprise at seeing naked car salesmen everywhere, we thought it would be good to continue with the tactic of tackling brand perceptions head on – this time with a tongue-in-cheek barrage of trepidacious activities under the banners of ‘some things are just worth trying’ and ‘if you’ve never tried one, how do you know you don’t like them?’

Once again, we enlisted the help of comedian Jimmy Carr to produce some great radio which hammered home Kia’s message: lighten up, it’s just a brand name – we’re sure you’ll love our cars once you try one.

No automotive retail sales promotion will ever work unless the brand’s network of dealers really put their hearts and souls into it. In the case of Challenge to Change, sales staff at one of Kia’s dealers in the Midlands actually fought over which of them would appear in their own version of the ad. Raj from Loughborough Kia, we salute you!

He then goes on to explain about how much financial sense they make for both the company and its fleet drivers, the range of environmentally-friendlier options, how well made, stylish and comfortable the cars are and just what a great driving experience they offer. He says he’ll leave behind some stuff and dumps a pile of brochures, photocopies and random bits of sales collateral in a clear pocket on the client’s desk.

This is the situation Kia wanted to avoid and we didn’t think it sounded terribly appealing either. Therefore we’ve just finished creating a complete branded environment for Kia UK’s Business Centres with impressively engineered packs, so that their sales teams can compete on more-than-equal terms in the fierce world of fleet sales.

To complement this, we’ve also just created a suite of brand ads that Kia will use to promote fleet sales and specialist business sales.

A product launch is a big deal for any car brand. It’s the end of a long road of research, development, product design and testing which routinely costs £100s of millions. When you get to the part where you have to create marketing materials across many international markets and utilise many different marketing suppliers, you have to be sure that your chosen suppliers can reflect your brand accurately and keep the look and feel of a launch intact, while injecting what’s necessary to make a launch work in a localised market.

It’s a lot trickier than it looks as there are so many variables and parameters to juggle and it’s the real test of whether an agency can stay on brief while still being creative. And that’s even before we get onto the level of experience and expertise required to manage the fulfillment of 200,000+ runs of complex direct mail…

Above are three we made earlier – direct mailers for the launches of Kia’s updated Sportage and Sorento models and a post-launch mailer for the Kia Venga.

Kia have been a main sponsor in the last two World Cups, so we expected that the first half of 2010 would have a lot of football-related work. And so it transpired… in 2010 we produced all the marketing materials for two national Kia World Cup competitions and everything for a promotion to win a World Cup-themed Soul. This went right across the board from print to producing a competition website.

You may be thinking ‘well, it’s easy to look this impressive when you have a giant budget to spend on locations, photographers and post-production houses…’ Indeed it is – except that we did it all in-house with nothing more than some very talented artists and careful art direction.

Our long standing relationship with Kia Motors in the UK and Ireland keeps going from strength to strength and it hasn’t escaped our notice that we’ve been working with Kia since before the original Picanto was launched in 2004.

This summer saw the launch of the new incarnation of the Picanto supermini – a lovely piece of work from their talented design team and a car that, coming on the back of their recent new Sportage crossover model, has really cemented Kia’s position in the British Isles as one of the big guys in automotive.

For the national launch we produced some really stunning work – direct mail, point-of-sale, press advertising, mini-brochures, showroom vehicle graphics and customer loyalty packs – all of it carefully conceived to fit in with a global product launch but still really push the buttons of British car buyers.

As the world of cars never stops, we’re already working on the next launches – a brand, spanking all-new Kia Rio and a facelift of their super-cool Soul model.

Kia has been a huge retail success story in the UK, but there’s also a giant world hidden away from the general public: fleet sales. It’s never traditionally been seen as terribly glamorous and, with a few exceptions, advertising in the sector has always been pretty safe.
We this campaign, we had the opportunity to create something that went beyond the usual ‘here’s a picture of the car and here are the numbers’ to demonstrate by example the benefits of being ahead of your game. Admittedly, we chose some pretty extreme examples: Charles Babbage’s proto-steampunk computing device from 1822 and Ring and Young’s description of a cell network for mobile phones from 1947.

…but that doesn’t mean that used car advertising can’t be imaginative. With this Kia spot for their 5-door cee’d model spot we had the client’s killer USP at our disposal: with their Approved Used programme, the cee’d gets its warranty reset back to the same as when it was a new car. So you get to buy a used car with a 7-year warranty – which is something you simply can’t do anywhere else.