The Vitara is Suzuki’s flagship SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle), however, in recent years it has seen a decline in sales, losing out to more powerful models from alternative manufacturers. We needed to find a way for the small Vitara to compete in this market.

SUVs are often marketed at a male skewed audience as the vehicle that perfect for off-road adventure. However, our audience research shows that most SUV owners never take them off-road. To promote the Suzuki Vitara, to a wider family audience we needed demonstrate that the car was not only perfect for adventure but also the everyday.

Budget constraints mean that we had to find an approach through a non-traditional and earned media channel to execute vehicle specific mini campaigns in order to drive consideration within this target market.

The Suzuki Vitara, is a vehicle that indexes heavily in value and comfort but does have the same off-roading capabilities as it’s immediate competition. We quickly identified that we could exploit this untapped market of SUV buying families.

The Australian car market is heavily populated with over 72 brands vying for consumers attention. Suzuki is also outspent by the majority of these brands. We needed a media approach that not only gave us the ability to reach car buyers but also could earn media, to give the campaign a presence long after the ATL media spend had expired.

We identified audio as the media that could act as an in-car channel, regardless of what car you were in.

We approached the media buy of this campaign the same way a band would launch an album.

We chose a single to launch the campaign and concept with a burst of paid media. We release our first single “To the ends of the block” as a TVC. This music video was accompanied by a commercial-radio buy to secure airtime and to get later songs on to commercial radio playlists.

By collaborating with The Longest Johns (Sony Music) to create the album we leveraged existing social-media following to reach the younger members of our family-centric audience. The band interviewed on radio, social and daytime-TV for PR, driving people to “test drive the album and the car”.

In the 2-month campaign a new song was released fortnightly, accompanied by promotions (in car-car-e-oke competitions) and activations.

The journey of the album was the journey of the campaign.

Land Shanties, the album has now exceeded over 2,500,000 album streams across Spotify and Apple music so far.

Importantly this has increasing unprompted awareness of the Vitara amongst this new market of family centric buyers 35% and prompted recall by 62%.

As a result, Suzuki have seen year on year sales of the Suzuki Vitara by 17%.