Thinkbox
Key Points
- Peugeot, a legacy brand had dropped from people’s minds in the category and wasn’t cutting through with its audience. But the launch of the New 308 model in 2022 presented the brand with an opportunity to shift the brand’s awareness levels and relaunch Peugeot’s new brand positioning.
- Understanding fully the audience habits through data to find the right moments of talkability across both linear and BVOD to drive conversation and consideration.
- 88% increase in web traffic over the campaign period, 144% increase in search volumes on the launch day of the campaign and winning number 1 spot in the Automotive Share of Voice battle.
The Challenge
Peugeot is a legacy brand in the automotive category, having been founded over 200 years ago. They are a brand that many believe they understand fully with many not taking steps to reappraise what the new and improved Peugeot stands for in the modern age. often associated with being ‘cheap’ ‘small cars’, the brand was getting lost in the mainstream as a result. Peugeot had, however, been on a transformation journey that saw Peugeot start to produce stunning new designs with high end quality throughout. They weren’t however joined by their audience on this journey and as a result there was a gap between the perception and the reality of the experience for the brand.
Having launched the 308 range in 2014 it was not well established in the market with low awareness levels among the small hatchback buying audience and hadn’t been seen on TV much as a result. But with the launch of the new hybrid in June 2022 and the car now carrying the new face of Peugeot, it was seen as the perfect time to launch the new brand platform of ‘The World’s Better With Allure’. The campaign needed to drive brand awareness and uplifts in both consideration and perception of Peugeot.
The TV Solution
308 as a brand hadn’t been on TV for 4 years which presented Starcom and Peugeot with an issue. Peugeot media habits and consumption habits of their Progressive Hedonist audience had changed dramatically, and the ad stock of the launch activity had long since faded. The brand had been focusing on short term channels which focused on sales over brand building. This led to the brand perceptions being underpinned by this activity with nothing on TV driving mass awareness of the changes the brand had undertaken. Starcom knew that the only way to shift this perception was to unleash the power of TV. With no AD stock to leverage, Peugeot knew they couldn’t buy their way out of the situation and would need to leverage the full scope of TV to get the brand out of the perception pit they found themselves in.
The Plan
With TV being highlighted as the only way to combat their perception problem, Peugeot and Starcom got to work in understanding how they could make the budget go as far as possible. Using their Planning tool TV+, Starcom set out to work out the optimal weekly weights that would allow the brand to create the strongest levels of Ad Stock from a standing start. It was decided that a 4-week campaign would give the campaign the highest levels of Ad stock to work off. Having found the right ad stock levels, Starcom set out to find the right frequency levels to meet the core objectives of brand consideration and get the new quality perceptions across with the Progressive Hedonist audience. This allowed Starcom to come at a target frequency of between 4 and 5.
With the goal of growing share of voice to place them in the top 3 for the EV category; Peugeot and Starcom needed to understand at what weekly weights the campaign would deliver the required cut through to raise awareness of Peugeot’s new brand platform. This would allow them to fully understand the different scenarios and at what weekly weights they would outshout competitors and deliver the required cut through with target audience to ensure Peugeot were in contention for the top 3 share of voice at campaigns end.
Having found the correct level for weekly weights and frequency, Starcom need to fully understand how they could optimise the campaign to try and hit the right consumers at the right time. Using in house planning tool TV+, Starcom were able to locate the top performing Channels, day of the week, daypart and programming that would allow them to pinpoint moments through the eyes of in-market EV buyers to ensure they were presenting the new image of Peugeot to consumers at the right times while viewers were in the right mind sets.
BVOD was added as a key element in helping to deliver incremental reach to combat the change nature of TV consumption in comparison to past 308 activity. This would allow Peugeot to deliver extended reach and lower the average age of the total AV campaign given the use of BVOD by 1634’s and lighter viewers. The campaign was planned so that it would match up with programming launches, which led to ITV taking higher levels of spend for the activity causing spikes against Love Island, a key show for the campaign to deliver against it goals. Using AV optimisation tools, Starcom were able to determine that the optimal split to hit the audience was 70/30 in favour of linear, this was a 10% higher BVOD spend then typical on Peugeot activity. The split allowed Starcom to show that BVOD was critical in helping to negate the declines in commercial reach that would have come from just using linear channels alone.
While TV formed the backbone of the activity, they integrated the campaign with wider media by activating around the biggest cinema release of the year, Top Gun Maverick, which amplified the TV activity and positioned the brand perfectly as being a contemporary in the most alluring, high end environment.
Results
As a result of the campaign, Peugeot saw significant increases in live sessions on their site. Over the campaign period, they saw an 88% increase in people accessing a Peugeot related page during the campaign period vs the past campaign period. On top of this, on the day the campaign went live, Peugeot saw an outstanding 144% increase in active daily sessions on their sites.
The effect of the campaign was seen right away with Starcom’s optimisation showing spikes around key programming with the biggest spike coming from Love Island, a key programme for the campaign and audience. This was something that Peugeot hadn’t seen before and haven’t seen since. Finally, the campaign saw that Peugeot had delivered against it goal of being in the top 3 in terms of Share of Voice for the EV category during the campaign period.
We were absolutely thrilled with the new 308 campaign. It brought the brand-building benefits of TV clearly back into focus, it was part of the promotion of the new era for Peugeot with our own rebranding and new EV launches that built through 2022 into 2023. The AV team devised an innovative and effective campaign, with a clear AV rationale and multiple Video Touchpoints that each had their own strengths, bringing together a solid campaign overall. AV was pivotal in achieving our primary objectives of awareness. There was a clear increase in response wihile the TV campaign was live which clearly showed the impact of TV had on leading being generater and strong search uplifts at the time of the campaign.
Mark LynchHead of Marketing Communications, Peugeot Marketing
Databank
Sector: Automotive
Brand: Peugeot 308
Campaign objectives: Brand Awareness and Perception
Target Audience: ABC1Adults
Budget: Aprox. £2 Million (according to Nielsen Ad Intel)
Campaign Dates: May- July 2022
TV Usage: Linear and BVOD
Creative Agency: Lucky Generals
Media Agency: Starcom
