The launch of the latest generation Corolla represented a turning point for the best-selling passenger car in the country, with a bolder, dynamic exterior design and more rewarding driving experience. Therefore, the communication plan had to match this turning point. We needed to create a moment of reconsideration with a new audience of younger car buyers, build relevance beyond the car’s reputation and re-establish the Corolla’s personality as ‘not just your nana’s car.

Being an enduring classic doesn’t mean standing still. For this campaign, we didn’t want to compare the new Corolla to other cars. It plays way too big a role in our lives for that. Instead we compared it to other staples that we can’t imagine life without, like pasta and jeans.

Just like pasta and jeans, Toyota Corolla has been part of the fabric of Kiwi culture for decades, but has now been reimagined. Innovations in safety, emissions, and design plant it firmly in the year 2018. Tastes may have changed over the years, but the love we share for Corolla remains undimmed. Nothing’s changed, except everything.

We were tasked with selling the Corolla to a much younger audience – a generation of car buyers more concerned with purchasing a vehicle to reflect their identity, rather than the traditional behavior of looking for “reliability” and “dependability”.

How would we get noticed in their daily lives, and, most importantly with this target segment, their daily feed?

We had to reach them where they’d be most likely to consume our content – on their mobiles. Our ‘mobile first’ creative took cues from the fashion world, instead of the car advertising world and was designed to build a sense of personal relevance by focusing on things people are actually interested in when they’re scrolling their newsfeed, like food and fashion. We knew our approach needed to keep content bite sized and quick to consume, as we’d have mere seconds to capture our audience’s attention.

We knew our audience would be viewing our content on their mobiles – so simply slapping 16:9 horizontal TVCs on their feeds wasn’t an option. Instead we created bespoke vertical outputs, cropped and formatted specifically for mobile viewing.

We stacked our Corolla hero spot on top of “Jeans” and “Pasta” to have 2x hero ads playing simultaneously in 1x frame, with 1x voice over cleverly scripted to work across both. Instead of having to fight for attention twice to ensure viewers saw both videos, we were able to reach our audience with 1x frame that told the whole story.

These were released at launch and ran for the full duration of the campaign on Toyota’s Facebook and Instagram channels, as well as YouTube pre-rolls on mobile devices.

By building this new identity for Corolla, we were able to effectively engage with younger car buyers.

- 78% increase in traffic to Corolla webpages

- 55% of all new users engaging with our content online were from our conquest target audience.

- More importantly, they represented 58% of engagements with our online customiser tool, with a conversion rate of 11% (vs. 6% for those 40+).

- Private sales for the Corolla hatch were up +96% year on year, at a time when the small car segment was down –17% year on year.

- Share of sales to the under 40 y/o market increased 35% year on year.

Not just your nana’s car anymore, is it?