In 2005, Scion set a sales target of 125,000 units, and ended up selling 156,485 units. In 2006, Scion set a sales barrier, rather than a target, of 160,000. They set the barrier so that they wouldn’t become too mainstream, in order to remain cool, hip, and trendy in the eyes of the fast-paced, traditional advertising-averse generation Y (Find stats Here)While Scion did spend $42.8 million in traditional, mass marketing efforts ($29.5 million on TV, $5.9 on print, $2.9 on the radio, $2.5 on the internet, and $2 million on outdoor advertising), they have made it a point to target Generation Y through unconventional methods (Stats are Here). Innovative campaigns and advertising messages, guerilla marketing, viral marketing, event sponsorship, and staying on top of technology and consumer trends in general have made Scion a success. Also, what hasn’t hurt: an Advergame that they set up called “Little Deviants.”
Scion’s Little Deviants campaign was created by an ad firm called “The Attik.” The campaign, so far, has generated quite a bit of word-of-mouth due to viral marketing, but it has also been promoted through traditional advertising including TV ads, print ads in magazines, internet banner ads, and outdoor advertising via billboards. The ads feature little, large-clawed, hellish, demon-looking creatures. Sometimes the ads show the creatures, the “deviants,” slaughtering little defenseless-looking sheep-people, called “sheeple.” All of the ads brand spiral the audience back to the hub of the Little Deviants campaign: www.littledeviant.com. Simon Needham, group creative director of The Attik, best explains this campaign’s concept:
“What we’re doing here is presenting the car as a little deviant, a little bad-ass. The brief was essentially, ‘Here is our new xD, how are we going to sell it?’ We reviewed the car, and we felt that the model was very aggressive-looking. We’re very familiar with our target audience, where they hang out, what they do and what they see. So the marketing campaign was based around a young trendleader and what they tend to be doing. The whole principle is telling a story. And we figured that presenting a book of the Fable of the Deviants was a really nice way of delivering our message (Digital Arts Online).”
On the website that all of the ads lead to, the user is cast into a first-person interactive advergame, where they are placed in this virtual world of deviants and sheeple, and they live out a fable, or a storybook, with nine chapters. The general premise is that the sheeple have been painting the city gray (literally); they have made the city gray and brown, boring and predictable, and the game’s player must kick them out of the city to save it. In each of these chapters, the player has a series of tasks that they must accomplish, most of which usually involve hitting, kicking, decapitating, dismembering, or otherwise killing the sheeple, all-the-while making little hidden references to the featured car, the Scion xD. It is definitely a violent game. However, the Little Deviants ads, and the Little Deviants game’s messages are clear, they are telling the audience to be different, to be cool, and to rebel against the ordinary. This is a great message to market to Generation Y, which has the highest generational trait of having high self-esteem; the majority of the members of Gen Y think that they are special, unique, and cool, and they strive for ways to show their peers this fact. Scion wants their cars to be one of those ways.
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