Campaign: #Askwhy Capitec brands cars

This brandyourcar.com campaign is an innovative way of raising Capitec’s profile in the student market. People treat banks like they treat cigarettes – you tend to stick with the one you started off with. So targeting students is a sound move in my opinion and a good target market for the bank to focus on.

Branding the cars seems like a great idea and as is mentioned the cars will be at universities most of the day and where most of the student target market hang out (because the brand ambassadors are students themselves). It also seems like a much more cost efficient way to do out of home advertising and something much more likely to get noticed than an expensive overpriced billboard.

I really like the idea of students sharing their experience on social media. Social media these days is absolutely key to generating earned media and getting the campaign beyond the campuses participating and to other potential consumers who may never see the branded cars. Student’s use of social media is also a bonus, as the campaign is likely to get traction on social media, spreading the campaign much further that just through line of sight of the branded cars.

This for me on the whole is an innovative campaign, but I do have a few issues with it.

Student drivers are statistically by far the most likely to crash and drive badly (probably only topped by taxi drivers). It doesn’t matter how well you train a student as a brand ambassador, by nature they more likely to wreck their car or drive badly. If this happens then the brand can lose control of their brand message. Basically it doesn’t look good for the brand if a car with Capitec on it crashed in a ditch or if a Capitec branded car breaks the speed limit.

The second issue that I have is that this campaign doesn’t scream Capitec’s persona as a challenger brand, fighting against the big four banks for the consumer and I would have liked to have seen a little more of that, because that’s where Capitec’s brand is placed in the consumers mind.

Finally, as much as I liked the idea of social media as part of this campaign, to me it feels like an afterthought after having seen the twitter page and exploring the use of #Askwhy (in a lot of cases people and consumers are using the hashtag to bash the brand). I believe that social media could have been added as a very strong element to the campaign, but as it stands is like a sixth toe- it’s there and functioning but it’s not doing anything really useful.

Other than that potential negatives the campaign seems like a good idea to reach the target market in a new innovative way.

Brandyourcar.com’s Capitic out of home campaign reviewed by Shane Punt.