After Nissan's Star Wars
tie-in kicked Rogue sales into hyper drive last month -- it was the U.S.
market's best-selling no pickup in December -- the automaker's marketing team
is tackling a new mission: spreading the compact crossover's success to other nameplates.
Nissan seized upon an opportunity to connect with shoppers through the popular
franchise's latest movie -- coincidentally titled Rogue One. Jeremy Tucker,
vice president of marketing communications and media at Nissan North America,
said he'll incorporate lessons learned from the campaign into his next steps.
He said the true goal of the campaign was name recognition. Many consumers
didn't even realize Nissan made a vehicle called "Rogue," he said.
The recognition -- along with strong industry wide crossover demand -- turned
Rogue into Nissan's best-selling 2016 vehicle. Year-over-year Rogue sales
jumped 53 percent in December to 40,477 vehicles. For the year, Rogue sales
rose 15 percent to 329,904 -- making it the 10th best-selling nameplate in the
U.S. One Nissan model should have an immediate benefit from the Star Wars
marketing campaign -- the Rogue Sport, which arrives this spring. "The
Rogue Sport is coming and we want to create that recognition again, the
excitement around it," Tucker told Automotive News. "It's all part of
the master plan: How do you start to kind of drive that recognition and break
through to consumers?" Part of the plan includes leveraging the Rogue's
popularity to showcase the rest of Nissan's lineup. During the Nissan Go Rogue
Year-End Event, Zimmerman Advertising, which is Nissan's Tier 2 agency, created
a guide for dealerships on how to use the Rogue as the centerpiece of the
showroom floor -- to "flank it" with other models and their deals.
Similarly, ChooseNissan.com used the Rogue event to drive customers online and
offer other vehicle options based on their online behavior. "It was a
great time to get deals on the entire line," Tucker said. "Rogue was
still the star and we wanted it to drive that awareness and that engagement,
but we wanted to open it up across the other model lines." Ultimately, he
said the Rogue One campaign, which runs until the end of April, represented a
fundamental shift in how Nissan approaches marketing. The "secret
sauce" of success was the involvement of the entire Nissan organization,
including the 1,100 Nissan dealerships that participated. He recruited six
Nissan retailers early on in the campaign to give marketing advice on behalf of
the dealer body. Retailer inclusion helped bring a national branding campaign
out of the ivory tower at headquarters and into local dealerships, Tucker said.
He said he considers the Rogue One campaign a best practice to build around.
But the question remains of how to imitate that campaign without a partner like
Lucas film, which produces the Star Wars films. "What I've learned from
this, and what I'm going to replicate, is how can we do this in every piece of
big marketing we have for every big launch, to get this level of dealer
engagement and involvement," Tucker said." How do we leverage our
dealers? How do we engage the organization? How do we build the brand
cohesively, Tier 1 to Tier 2?" Tucker asked. "That's the future for
how we'll be building marketing for Nissan."