Monday, June 11, 2012
Friday, June 8, 2012
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Kia Raises A Guinness For Optima Hybrid
Kia has launched a campaign for its Optima Hybrid car that spotlights the vehicle’s achievement of winning a Guinness World Record. The car got Guinness props last year for having achieved the lowest fuel consumption in a hybrid when a couple of pro drivers toured the 48 contiguous United States on 5½ tanks of gas. They went 7,899 miles at 64.55 miles per gallon by driving at optimal speeds and under optimal conditions.
The new campaign, targeted to Gen Xers and younger Baby Boomers, re-tells that story with two professional drivers randomly pulling over in the middle of a desert highway to chat with a man going cross-country on a pogo stick, who is also attempting to set a Guinness record. In the end, the drivers tell the pogo guy that they, too are in the process of setting a World Record and then take off into the sunset. Tag: "Not your average hybrid."
The campaign, via David&Goliath, Kia's long-time U.S. agency, also has print, direct-mail, collateral, and promotional elements. The digital component of the campaign, at Kia.com/Hybrid, allows consumers to delve into the Guinness World Record road trip and get info on how to optimize -- so to speak - their own hybrid driving.
The TV ad began airing on June 5 on network with cable, syndication on schedule. The spot will run on all the networks, plus around 30 cable channels, including Adult Swim, BET, Discovery, Comedy Central, Travel, E!, Oxygen, and Spike.
"When we first started launching about a year ago we did a very product-focused campaign,” says Michael Sprague, Kia Motor America VP marketing. “This lets us tell more of a story." He tells Marketing Daily that the company and its agency dreamed up the Guinness attempt as a way to talk about the car beyond merely advertising it. "We were trying to think of creative ways of telling consumers about our new hybrid and after lots of research we found there was opportunity to set that Guinness record. We looked at it and figured out that yeah, we could do that. We worked with the Guinness organization to make sure it could be validated by them and then set off to do it."
Sprague says the issue for the Optima Hybrid is actually not demand so much as capacity. "We are just finishing rolling it out across the country. We started on the West Coast, then the East Coast, followed by the southern markets in the spring and now the Midwest, and what we've learned is that availability -- the right color, or options -- is the reason people don't buy they vehicle. They want a certain package, but due to constraints, can't get it."
While no advertising might be the best advertising when supply is tight, Sprague argues that the Optima Hybrid campaign serves a broader purpose. "It promotes the product but also builds familiarity and awareness of us as a brand. Someone might not want to buy a hybrid, but they want to be associated with a brand that sells one, and is environmentally conscious." There’s something to that: Toyota's Prius has probably done more for Toyota branding equity than it has for Toyota sales volume.
Courtesy of MarketingDaily
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Long-term 2012 Kia Rio SX 5-door is well equipped
The Koreans are on a roll. No longer should it surprise us when we find one of their vehicles impressive. It's the norm anymore, regardless of the metric, from performance to quality to value.
That is, we shouldn't be surprised, and yet we're still occasionally amazed by the level of sophistication these cars can deliver for the money, especially at the low end. So we sprang for a long-term test of the recently launched Kia Rio to see exactly how well one of our favorite new Korean cars would fare over the long haul. For starters, the Rio is available in two body styles, as a sedan or a five-door hatchback, and seeing as we tend toward the hauling-more-is-always-better end of things around here, we opted for the latter and its 15.0 cubic feet of cargo space. (Folding the rear seats opens that up to a whopping 47.1 cubic feet.) Besides, the price differential between the two is negligible, at just $200. But with the hatch you get oh, so much more capability, which-given all of the softball games and camping trips and Costco runs that fill our weekends-we exploit at every opportunity. Every Rio model draws power from the same all-aluminum 1.6-liter direct-injection four-cylinder gasoline engine with continuously variable valve timing, turning out 138 hp and 123 lb-ft of torque. It's a high-tech piece designed as much for fuel efficiency as power, returning an EPA-estimated 30 mpg in the city and 40 mpg on the highway (33 mpg combined). Given our lead feet and penchant for bombing around town at nine-tenths, we're keen to find out exactly how well the Rio performs at the pump over the course of the year. We then climbed the trim-level ladder all the way to the top, choosing the chockablock SX model on which to build our car. The SX trim gets a standard tilt-and-telescoping steering wheel, 17-inch wheels and tires, a sport-tuned suspension, fog lamps, LED taillights, dual exhaust tips, Bluetooth connectivity and steering-wheel audio controls. It also boasts features that we welcome but that seem almost out of place on such a small car, including power-folding outside mirrors and a rearview camera. To that healthy list of standard content we checked just about every options box possible, adding a power sunroof, navigation, push-button keyless ignition and heated and leather-trimmed seats. The grand total for our loaded Rio comes to almost $21,000. That sum doesn't exactly get you a race car, but the 1.6-liter does a decent job of propelling the Rio to 60 mph from a standstill in 9.3 seconds. Stopping from that speed eats up 132.1 feet. Perhaps more enjoyable is the car's midrange power; it takes only 3.6 seconds to accelerate from 30 mph to 50 mph. And while it's not the nimblest of cars, it does manage a respectable 42.1 mph through our tight little slalom course and can hold 0.79 g around our 200-foot skidpad. That should make for some moderate around-town fun. Unfortunately, because only base LX models get the six-speed manual standard -- and our gluttony for features and options pushed us to the top-line SX -- we will have to make do with the six-speed automatic transmission. We'll see how much of that 138 hp is left after making its way through the torque converter. Hopefully we'll still be able to enjoy the actual act of driving while saddled with the slushbox. Here's to a surprisingly good year with our newest long-termer.Courtesy of AutoWeek
Monday, June 4, 2012
Don't miss the latest offer on the 2012 Kia Optima!
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2012 Kia Optima - $189 a Month / 36 Month Lease
$189 a Month / 36 Month Lease $2,499 Due at Lease Signing. See Dealer for details 