MINI Mischief and Horseplay Executive summary

A key brand facet of MINI is that it comes across like ‘like a friend’. Humour is one of the simplest ways of achieving this relationship with an audience. MINI already perform well in this area and have a long standing heritage in ‘fun’ so the objective in 2014 was to maintain and build on this through taking advantage of relevant tactical opportunities. The two campaigns in 2014, around the key pillars of sport, via the Grand National and motoring – via Ken Gibson’s last edition of Sun Motoring were a perfect demonstration of MINI’s personality. Copy read ‘’More Horses than Aintree’’ and ‘’Don’t waste your pension on a Golf Ken’!

Background and objectives

The 2014 marketing objective was to increase MINI relevancy amongst young men. The communications objective, in turn, was to align the brand with big sporting moments and behave ‘like a friend’ to really drive this relevancy. We achieved this by selecting the most relevant tactical opportunities, where the creative executions could perfectly deliver to the ‘like a friend’ metric – a quality not quantity approach. These topical and humorous ads were to build on fame achieved in 2013 during the horsemeat scandal with “More horsepower than a lasagne”, giving momentum and maintaining MINI’s tone of voice - its point of differentiation from all other car brands. Quality newsbrands offered the perfect audience, the desired level of scale and relevant environment, through sport and motoring sections, for this type of messaging. We were able to place MINI in either standout positions (such as OBC) or next to relevant content to really maximise the relevance to our male audience.

Insight (out of 10)

The Grand National is one of the most inclusive occasions in the sporting calendar. It’s watched by over 8 million in the UK and many people who do not normally watch or bet on horse racing at other times of the year get involved as, like MINI, it is perceived to be fun. The event shares MINI’s same adventurous, go-getting spirit and therefore was an ideal platform to align with. It also offered an opportunity to build further on the dramatisation of horse power through the horse meat jokes of 2013 “More horses than a lasagne” to “More horses than Aintree”. Ken Gibson had not only dominated British motoring journalism but had become one of the most widely recognised and influential figures in the industry worldwide. His retirement was therefore an event not only within the industry but for our broader male audience too and therefore posed another ideal opportunity to communicate the MINI tone of voice which differentiates it from all other car brands. By using Ken’s last edition, we were able to poke fun at MINI’s biggest competitor, the Golf, with “Don’t waste your pension on a Golf Ken”. Both relevant platforms allowed us to communicate in MINI’s unique tone of voice with a view to making the reader smile, and therefore behave, like a ‘friend’.

The plan

Newsbrands still very much drive the agenda for current news stories; MINI were able to capitalise on this to drive their fun brand messaging by the placement of adverts containing topical and humorous copy in relevant context.

Working closely with MINI’s creative agency Iris, we had the foresight to plan for the Grand National tactical opportunity but were nimble enough to be able to take advantage of the news of Ken’s retirement.

‘’More Horses than Aintree’’ full page creative ran either in premium positions in sport sections or against the extensive Grand National Content. ‘”Don’t waste your pension on a Golf Ken’’ half-page creative ran in Ken’s final edited edition of The Sun Motors which was a celebration of his 23 year editorship.

Both campaigns ran in newsbrands exclusively as the most timely and relevant environments to capitalise on the tactical opportunities. The executions in the relevant editorial perfectly demonstrated MINI’s fun personality in the context of the key male targeted pillars of sport and motoring.

Results

Whilst it is not possible to exactly isolate the specific impact made by the newsbrands in this instance, we do know that male ownership has increased by 5% YOY. We can’t directly attribute this to our two tactical campaigns however we would certainly make the assumption that it contributed to the wider MINI activities in 2014 which collectively delivered this.