INEOS Automotive and SHARE partnered to build relevancy within the 4×4 community & launch the Grenadier on social.
Tough Terrain
We had a particularly unique challenge with the development of the INEOS Grenadier community. The brand-new 4X4 vehicle, had no predecessors, was the first vehicle ever for INEOS off the production line and there was a 2-3 year period where the physical product wouldn’t be in the hands of the users (extended by global supply chain issues), from project inception to delivery.
Our goal was to attract potential customers, convince them to reserve, and then eventually to order. Keeping those who had reserved, warm, throughout this purchase journey, was essential to a successful launch.
A successful launch wasn’t just reliant upon attracting potential customers, convincing them to reserve, and then eventually to order. We had to keep those who’d reserved just as engaged throughout their own journey, because the business was still very much in its infancy and first impressions with the brand could make or break an eventual order completion.
So to achieve this, we had to make sure that the promotional periods for the exterior, interior, reservation, and order launches, across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube, were as engaging as possible, for an audience that hadn’t yet touched the 4X4, so that they felt like they were fully immersed in the Grenadier journey.
Community-Powered Content
We didn’t have a community of people regularly sharing vehicle reviews, drives or testimonials. However, we did have people exploring the Grenadier at events or talking about how they were configuring their orders.
So community management was an integral vehicle for developing brand authenticity, and we did this by putting people at the heart of our strategy, telling their stories and their plans for the vehicle, prospectively.
We also had the chance to discover what the audience really wanted from this new vehicle, by giving them a chance to express themselves within our concepts eg. “pick your favourite colour” or “customise this vehicle” via Instagram Story Stickers.
Now most brands just share User Generated Content (UGC), maybe with a little annotation, an Instagram Story with some copy, or even a #TBT image album, but we needed to be more pirate. So we decided to turn public conversations about the vehicle into content executions.
Take this post from Paul, he was trying to decide which vehicle colour to select, so we turned his dilemma into a vote for our community to participate with, via Instagram Stories.
Or this Facebook Group vote we found and turned into an asset for our channels, to honour the top three colour choices in the eventual poll results.
Or little Harry visiting the Grenadier at an event wearing merch from a competitor. We reached out to Harry’s dad via IG DM to fix that!
This approach proved to our community that no matter what platform they were communicating about the vehicle on (even beyond our owned channels), we were always watching and listening to them, awarding their patience.
We continued to put the user at the heart of the experience, beyond UGC, by giving them a chance to have a direct impact on the content we were sharing. We’re talking about community data driving our executions, not just content managers thinking of content ideas based on best performing content the previous month.
For example, we encouraged fans to build a vehicle using voting mechanisms across three different platforms, before we shared the winning vehicle combinations to the feed a few days later:
We found unique ways to incorporate community questions into Q&A style posts, because if several people are asking the same question, it probably means there are lots more people out there wondering the same thing.
We even encouraged users to tell us how they plan to use the vehicle when it arrives by simply reaching out to them via DM and asking them to pick up their phones.
