Case Study

Honda
Honda Civic Live Tour

Honda was introducing a new Honda Civic design to attract a younger, hipper customer, ages 18-34. They launched the Honda Civic Live Tour, a six-city tour that featured free live concerts by leading bands like Black-Eyed Peas, John Legend and 311 combined with a festival and test drives. This was Honda’s first attempt to organize this type of an event. On board less than 30 days before the kick-off, The Powell Group was responsible for lifestyle/entertainment media relations in New York, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In addition to a rushed time frame, a commercial message and no local spokespeople added to our challenges.

To create news to feed the media, The Powell Group leveraged the “tuner” trend. Tuners are car enthusiasts who customize vehicles, most often compact imports like the Honda Civic, to increase their performance, personalize their appearance or enhance the volume of their engines or audio equipment. Tuners are mostly but not exclusively male, from diverse ethnic backgrounds and are predominantly young – the exact market Honda was going after for the new Civic. The Powell Group identified and worked with tuner groups in each of the markets where the Honda Civic Live Tour made a stop. Tuner spokespeople were identified to talk with the media about the tuner trend and the new Civic’s appeal to performance car enthusiasts. Without the benefit of advertising dollars, The Powell Group leveraged the vehicle’s association with this hip, young urban demographic to create successful radio partnerships with local stations to promote the tour.

Generated a total of 4.6 million impressions with an estimated value of $250,000 in publicity value. Booked test drives at every Honda Civic Live tour stop. Generated strong traffic back to local Honda dealers. Bottom line: overcame a very commercial message in a short period of time to drive traffic.

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