It’s time to look at the shortlist for Marketer of the Year, which appears in Marketing’s Nov. 19 issue. We’ll be featuring each one online as a lead-up to our January 2013 issue, where you’ll find out which marketer will reign supreme.
A challenger brand in every sense that enjoyed a smoking-hot year with a very small marketing budget.
There’s a lot that can distract a modern marketer—new online technologies, the crescendoing voice of the consumer, a tectonically 
unstable media landscape and budgets that all but kill experimentation.
But despite such modern distractions, the marketing function can still be expressed with a simple equation: applying budget, creative consultation and consumer insight to a business objective can build brands and move product. Subaru, one of the smallest auto players in Canada, applied this exact formula to its 2012 work and produced two good, old-fashioned advertising campaigns worthy of the Marketer of the Year shortlist.
Subaru’s place in Canada’s auto race is hardly the pole position. It had tremendous success getting noticed with its “Sexy Sumo” campaigns a few years back, but it’s Asia’s other automakers—Toyota, Honda and Hyundai—battling the American giants for top-five sales rankings. The Asian trifecta sells in the ballpark of 11,000 to 16,000 units per month (and Toyota even measures its Canadian market share in double digits) while Ford, GM and Chrysler chalk up 18,000 to 24,000 per month.
In that context, Subaru’s sales are quite modest—more than 2,600 units were sold in September and YTD market share increased to 1.7% from 1.6% that same month. But this comes a year after its supply chain was ravaged by production problems caused by the Japanese tsunami. The rocky close to 2011, when recalls slowed or halted North American sales, didn’t help either.
Given the poor footing the brand started from, its small sales gains are noteworthy. According to Geoff Craig, Subaru’s director of marketing, the campany has approximately 10% of the marketing budget of its bigger competitors, and for its 2012 sales season it faced two big challenges: the BRZ and the XV Crosstrek, brand new vehicles that marked the company’s entrance into new auto categories. The addition of two models to a lineup only eight cars strong meant that limited budget was going to have to work hard.
For the BRZ, the brand’s first-ever sports car (co-developed with Toyota, which is marketing basically the same vehicle in Canada wearing its Scion badge), Subaru set out to sell every unit of its Canadian allotment. The halo car had a limited production run, but needed to be visible enough for people to see the halo’s effect on the other models. At a price point just over $27,000, the company determined its best market was young, tech-loving “enthusiasts” (Subaru’s term for the guys who care more about horsepower and torque than backseat leg room) who it says “have a strong appreciation for creativity, design and the unconventional.” Tech-y youth are already being aggressively courted by campaigns for the Ford Fusion and Chevrolet Cruze, so to differentiate its advertising Subaru focused on what young men have valued since the American Graffiti era: hot cars.
Its literal approach to that strategy started with an online-only video showing a parking garage melting around an electric blue BRZ that drifted out of a cloud of steam at the video’s conclusion. Banner ads burst into flames and burned up websites. The windows of a mock showroom were melted into a black, bubbling, dripping mess around the car. Subaru even figured out a way to carry the hot concept to print with a cool lenticular cover on Toronto weekly The Grid and burnt paper ads in the pages of other dailies. Air shimmered, paint blistered, metal burned. All developed with help from Subaru’s creative agency, DDB Canada.
And product moved. Since the first BRZs arrived in the summer (further delayed by a still-recovering production chain, says Craig), all 450 of the 2012 allotment have sold (and 2013 orders are filling up) thanks to more than 800 million impressions earned through social media and the sweltering video spot that earned more than 433,000 views online (which isn’t bad for a car only marketed in North America by a brand that’s never aspired for “cool” before).
The XV Crosstrek, meanwhile, was the company’s entry into the compact utility vehicle or “crossover” segment. The company wants to sell 1,400 of them in its September-to-December season. While final numbers weren’t available at press time, monthly sales targets were being exceeded by 174%.
Compared to the BRZ’s socially driven word-of-mouth campaign, this model has a far larger media buy for full national reach. The campaign creative focuses on the city/country aspect of the vehicle’s class. An actor plays two sides of one character—the modern man-about-town and the bearded nature-lover—to mimic this duality, showing the Crosstrek as an urban shopping and going-out kind of car as well as something more rugged that will get hippies to their deep-woods campsites. Print and online ads similarly played up the city versus country concept.
It was time to reallocate what limited resources the brand had, moving dollars toard the more mainstream Crosstrek. Craig said compared to the brand’s last major-league media spend—the “sexy sumos” of years past—the Crosstrek’s media investment was 10% larger.
“I’ve been with the company 18 years, and it’s the largest media spend I’ve experienced for a [Subaru] vehicle launch,” Craig said.
That such a limited budget could get two new products to a national audience is nothing short of a feat.
To read more about the companies that made the Media Players of the Year and Marketers of the Year shortlists, check out Marketing’s Nov. 19 issue, which is on newsstands now.
