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Citroën

Supporting the Electric Vehicle Revolution

Supporting the Electric Vehicle Revolution.

We Are Acuity is an expert at activating national brand campaigns locally. Part of our challenge is to help clients and their local retail outlets to react to rapidly changing market conditions. We connect national and local marketing activity seamlessly and maximise sales opportunities.

 

We’ve always had a specialist team that works with the automotive industry. It’s a sector that has experienced huge disruption over the last 2-3 years as stock levels, consumer demand, pricing and competitor activity have all fluctuated wildly following the pandemic. Our role is to help our clients and their retailer networks continue to reach the right local audiences, with impactful and meaningful messages that keep the brand moving forward.

Challenge

For Citroën (and almost all automotive brands in the UK), Electric Vehicles (EVs) is the no.1 priority right now. It’s an increasingly competitive area of the market with new challenger brands entering the race and causing real disruption. For example, in the first 9 months of 2022 over 155,000 Chinese made cars were sold in Europe, over double the previous year. But ongoing supply chain challenges and the backdrop of a cost-of-living crisis have meant many traditional OEMs are unsure whether to stick or twist with their budgets.

 

Citroën was keen to stay active and to keep the brand front of mind for potential automotive buyers. But equally, if it was going to commit to spending, it wanted its investment to go as far as possible. The retailer network needed to be engaged and guided, and Citroën looked to We Are Acuity for that national creative and local direction.

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Insight

Stock challenges are well publicised across all automotive brands, but it felt like Citroën had a really good story to tell around Electric Vehicles. Not only did the brand have the established 100% electric E-C4, but recently launched were new hybrid models in the shape of New C5 Aircross and New C5 X. We’d launched all these models in partnership with the brand and their retailers, so we knew them well.

We just needed to package it up in a way which would provide an attractive tactical proposition for the consumer plus a reason to engage for the network. With a strong understanding of the Citroën brand and our recent ‘Power to the People’ EV campaign, our studio set about finding that point of difference.

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Solution

This insight gave us direction for the campaign. We’d create a new creative concept in keeping with the brand’s current campaign look and feel, bringing the 3 focus EV models together. This would be used across national and local retailer communications. Working closely with our clients we developed a limited-time local showroom event with enhanced offers to drive enquiry and footfall during the first part of September.

 

Materials were delivered across digital, social and CRM, with the result a multi-channel, multi-faceted approach that worked at both a national and local level. Retailers were engaged via phone, email and video and we even ran paid social media advertising for retailers to boost local awareness.

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Results

The campaign was turned around rapidly by Acuity in less than 2 weeks from brief to delivery as we worked in tandem with our clients and delivered against all deadlines.

A fantastic 81% of the retailer network engaged with the opt-in campaign with over 350 local marketing materials downloaded from our local marketing hub.

Social media campaigns run on behalf of a number of local retailers for 10 days generated an impressive number of impressions and a very competitive average cost per click.

We are confident our efforts played a part in driving interest in EVs in September. Across the market Plug-In car registrations (BEV plus PHEV) continued to rise that month with 38,116 new registrations of BEVs and 12,281 of PHEVs, giving an overall market share of 22.40% of all new car registrations. Fantastic!

Overall, Citroën and their dealers were truly delighted with the outcome.

 

+735K Impressions
+550K Reach
570+   Clicks
£1.50  Average cost per click

 

If you’d like to talk about your brand’s local marketing why not schedule a FREE 30-minute assessment today here? It will be well worth your time.

Or alternatively read more about Local Marketing on our blog page "Local Thinking': https://www.weareacuity.com/local-thinking-our-blog