Miscellaneous Features
S40 Marketing Campaign Analysis: An Interview with John Maloney
By by: George Achorn
Feb 23, 2004, 23:17

Recently Swedespeed sat down with John Maloney, Vice President of Communications for Volvo Cars North America to learn about the product launch plan of the new S40. Numbers in a recent article on Gamepro.com suggest that Volvo is investing an estimated $28 million on the launch of their entry-level replacement, Volvo’s largest push model push for 2004, a large investment for their smallest car.

As VP of Communications, John is in charge of orchestrating Volvo’s message and product to consumers including marketing efforts such as advertising, commercials, driving events, mailings, etc. Until you start signing on a car, your interaction with Volvo probably falls under his umbrella, and as such, he’s the man with the plan and was kind enough to share that plan with us.

SS – With the new S40, it’s a new car and presumably a new approach. How are you differing the marketing campaign of this car from your other cars?

JM – Any time you have a new car, you have an opportunity to extend the brand. Obviously it’s a lot easier to do with a new car launch than it is to do with a car that’s been in the marketplace. What we really want to do is build upon the momentum we established last year. We did have record sales… up 22% over last year. And, now that we include January, we’re up 15 months in a row, year over year. So really we want to build upon that success.

What we want to do is contemporize the very successful campaign we launched last year, entitled “You Think, Then You Build”. We started that with the XC90 and carried it through what we call our tier 2 work, or our dealer ad group work.

We’d like to contemporize that. We know we need to do that for this audience, which is very youthful. I don’t want to get too locked into demographics, but if you said “What is the target?” the median age is 35 for the all-new S40. This isn’t out of reach, because the first year we had the current S40, we did achieve a 38 year median age and then it went up pretty substantially after that.

That’s sort of the going in premise.

SS – We see you’re partnering with the Virgin Megastores and planning the driving events. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of the ways you’re tying the car into things?

JM – Sure. The overall campaign theme is called “Pop Culture”. And really the overriding idea or main message that we want to convey is that the all-new S40 is surprisingly cool, but reassuringly a Volvo. To do that, what we wanted to do was put the all-new S40 where the hottest cars show up, but maybe not Volvos typically, causing people to stop and rethink maybe what they might believe about Volvo. At the same time, we want to emphasize class-leading safety and strength to sort of bring them back as the “reassuringly Volvo” part of it.

Three of the overriding things that we found out about the audience that we want to talk to are that they love cars, they love music and they’re very wired. That’s just part of their lives. So we want this campaign to be unexpected but credible. In other words it might be something that is unexpected from Volvo, but certainly is credible. It’s diversity targeted, but mainstream relevant and totally integrated. So that’s sort of the premise going in.



There are multiple elements. We literally started in the U.S. primarily at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. That was the first time both the S40 and V50 were shown. Concurrent with their debut in Detroit, we started our interactive campaign, generating interactive leads for us. We have a very slick and highly stylized website that talks to customers.

If you haven’t been there, I highly encourage you to do it. I think it’s actually one of the best automotive sites that are out there at the moment.

We also launched that day a contest for “Four Friends for Life”. Basically, that was a way to generate enthusiasm for the car and get people to opt in for more information. The goal or the sweepstakes is to win an all-new S40 and a custom trip, but to do that you had to register, and you would register three friends. So you register three friends, and they in turn are notified that they’ve been registered as your travel mates. Then they can decide to modify it and register for themselves to travel with three other friends. There’s sort of a viral nature to it.

We’ve had well over 100,000 people sign up for the sweepstakes with a very high opt-in rate. So, not every one of those people says they want more information. I don’t want to go into the figures because it’s a little bit early and I don’t want to tip off our competitors as to how well it’s going, but I can tell you the opt-in rate is much higher than we’ve ever seen for people wanting more information on the car.

The second element, which just started two weeks ago, is our tie-in with Virgin Megastores. That was a partnership that we had struck late in the summer of last year. Basically, we have a presence in all of the Virgin Megastores and then a tour that goes to really the top 10 markets, where we have a street team that is literally in front of the store with the cars and in the store with a very unique kiosk that has a hologram of the S40 that sort of floats in the air. People are there who are trained on the vehicle, and the reason we picked Virgin quite honestly is that their demographics are almost spot-on with the demographics we’re going for on this car. So unlike XC90 where we thought people would come to our stores, having been waiting for an SUV from Volvo, we felt that we needed to put this car in front of the consumer and not rely on their visiting our stores.

The Virgin Megastore Tour just started two weeks ago out here on the west coast and will tour the country really through the end of April.

The next element, which starts next weekend, is the driving experience. You may have noticed that several years ago we chose to get out of traditional sponsoring. We don’t really do golf or tennis. We thought it was important for people to drive our cars. If we have an image that in some way lags reality, the quickest way to get people to change their mind is not to put your name on a golf tournament. It is to get people to drive your cars. That’s how confident we are.

So several years ago, beginning with the S60, we started doing these big touring consumer ride and drive programs. And we typically are using those during the launch phase of a car. It’s a lot easier to get people to come out for a consumer ride and drive when a vehicle is fresh rather than when it’s been on the market for a long time, because then they could just go drive it at a dealership quite honestly.

We just started that program in Southern California last weekend in El Toro. It is the same type of high level ride and drive that we’ve always done, though there are a couple twists. Something I don’t think anyone’s ever done, on the Saturday nights in the cities we go to as part of our partnership with Virgin, we’ll be having a night drive and a concert. So there’s a night drive that consumers can do as well as attend a concert by Virgin recording artist Gavin Degraw. That was part of the tie-in with Virgin and a way of tying in all of these elements.

Even though our first event had rainy weather conditions, we’re quite pleased with the turnout. The crowd was very young, very diverse, and with a high awareness of automobiles. It’s on target with where we had hoped it would be.

SS – Will Gavin Degraw be at each of the venues?

JM – He’ll be performing on Saturday nights at all the venues. So, it’s a unique venture for two reasons. For one, it’s a night drive and I’m not aware of any other manufacturers that have typically done that. And then concurrent with that night drive will be a live concert, that’ll be broadcast. For people who want to be out driving on the course, I think the intent is to broadcast the concert even right into the cars.

The other thing I should go back to, is that on the Virgin Megastore Tour, these street teams that are out will have go-cards or postcards to hand out. These tours are scheduled two weeks before the consumer ride and drive comes to the market. So in this fashion, it also becomes a way to route people who are interested to our ride and drive that comes to their area two weeks later. It becomes one more element to recruit people to come to our ride and drive. Direct mail recruitment is actually one of the most costly components to operating a ride and drive, because you have to drop a lot of direct mail to get people to attend.

The next element that actually drops within about a week is a very edgey direct mail piece that ties into the Virgin Megastore partnership, ties into the ride and drive and then ties into our television advertising. Because, what we did in the television advertising, which is actually the last thing that’s up and will begin at the beginning of March, is that we go back to what our target market loves… again, they love cars, love music and they’re very wired.

Our ad agency and we were looking for places where cars are prominently featured that are relevant to this audience. Two of these areas, among others that we landed on, were the whole notion of music videos and videogames. In music videos cars are sort of romanticized and even fetishized, although maybe they haven’t historically been Volvos. The genre of videogames where a player drives cars is the other area where cars are prominently shown that this age group still follows with a large appetite. As the technology of video games has continued to advance, people have tended to follow it. We thought, okay, we’re going to actually produce two 30-second spots; launch spots for the car.

One of the spots will look and feel just like an authentic music video, closely resembling something you might see on MTV or VH1. We actually recruited the sort of preeminent music video director in the business right now, Dave Meyers. We shot the ad in Barcelona and it is very much the car in a music video with words over the top that says basically “don’t be surprised when the car starts to show up in music videos.”



SS: What musical artist is featured in the video?

JM: It’s a new band by the name of Dilated Peoples. The single, “This Way”, I am told is just starting to hit some radio stations now out here on the West Coast.

With the other spot, we decided we wanted the look and feel of a videogame. Initial thoughts on this were that the ad agency would create a video game environment, though it immediately became clear to us that we might want to talk to Microsoft, who we’ve partnered with before and who had been developing their own new videogame RalliSport Challenge 2 for Xbox. That game, due out this spring, will feature the S40 as well as two other previous model Volvos, so rather than inventing our own video game environment, Microsoft was able to provide us with the RalliSport Challenge environment. With a few changes for our needs, including creation of the S40 as we wanted it to appear in the commercial, the result was impressive. The end commercial is one that shows the virtual S40 from start to finish, but never actually shows a real car. We’re very excited about it, it’s the first time we know of that a manufacturer has used a video game like this to show their product. We included a DVD in our recent mailing to initial “hand raisers”, or people who expressed interest in the car. On that DVD, we included some video on the making of these commercials.

SS: When will the commercials air?

JM: They’ll begin shortly in March. Obviously we’re targeting a younger audience, and the positioning of the commercials will reflect that.




After the interview, we asked John to send us a listing of where a Volvophile might find the commercials running. He was kind enough to provide that, with a basic listing of placement below.

Commercial Media Selection

- National Cable: (5) Networks -- ESPN, VH1, Comedy Central, E, The Learning Channel

- Spot Television in Top 20 Markets -- Programming will vary by market. Here is a sample of typical appointment television Primetime shows: CSI, Friends, Alias, Third Watch, Ed, Will & Grace, Frazier, NYPD Blue, Cold Case Files, American Idol, etc...

- Prime Time effort will be supplemented in the Top 20 markets with Late news and Late Fringe/entertainment programming that echoes the busy lifestyle (and long days) of affluent young audiences

After the Interview we also did a little background research on some topics that came up in the interview.

Dave Meyers, director of the “Music Video” spot has also directed videos for artists including Janet Jackson, Enrique Iglesias, No Doubt, B2K, Mick Jagger, Jennifer Lopez, Ja Rule, Pink, Britney Spears, Outkast, Shakira, Celine Dion and more. More information can be found at MTV.com.

Dilated Peoples are a Hip Hop band, and the single "This Way" will be the first single off of their new album Neighborhood Watch, due out in stores on April 6. More information on the band can be found at their website at dilatedpeoples.com.

RalliSport Challenge 2 is scheduled for debut May 4, 2004. As John mentioned, it will include the all-new S40, a 240 Rally Car and an Amazon. Screencaptures of the game including the new S40 in race trim can be found at the S40 website found at allnews40.com. Go into the Explore Exterior section and click on photos.

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