Like, You Know, Whatever: Chevrolet to Reach Millennials Using Social Media
Millennials tend to get a bad rap nowadays. The post-baby boomer generation — born between 1980 and the early part of the 2000s—seem to sometimes be associated with nonsense jargon, laziness, and superficiality. However, this is not necessarily the case. This is, after all, the generation that gave the world seriously incredible advancements in technologies. One of those advancements, for better or for worse, is the social media universe. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, Tumblr, all of these in some way, like it or not, have changed the ways in which we connect with one another. Naturally, this means that these new social media avenues have readily changed the way companies do business with regard to advertising, since these millennials now outnumber their baby boomer parents and grandparents two-to-one. And, of course, automakers are getting on board, so to speak, via this generation’s ultimate source of communication: social media.
Enter, for example, Chevrolet. “This generation now accounts for one-fourth of all new vehicle sales, and they didn’t grow up with many Chevrolets in their driveway,” said Chevrolet’s marketing director for cars and crossovers, Steve Majoros. In fact, millennials are more likely to buy a brand of car that their parents didn’t drive. A third of Spark (39 percent), Sonic (36 percent), and Chevy Cruze (35 percent) buyers are new to Chevrolet. Millennials have essentially become Chevrolet’s target audience and here at Apple Chevrolet, your Chicagoland Chevy dealer, we couldn’t agree more.
This all means that the bowtie brand needed to find new ways for it to reach millennial consumers. In essence, this means that, by using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, Tumblr, and other forms of social media (along with the occasional celebrity event/tie-in here and there), Chevrolet has discovered new ways to positively influence and educate millennial consumer with regard to the brand. “It’s important to incorporate a playful, but authentic tone,” said Mallory Woodrow, Chevrolet’s digital and social media manager. “We try to customize our messages to be brief, especially on some of the newer platforms.”
A good example of how Chevrolet is pushing new ways of reaching this generation of potential buyers has to do with the company’s use of the online mobile photo and video-sharing social network, Instagram, which was launched in October of 2010 and now boasts over three hundred million active users. Chevrolet, using their sponsorship of the 2015 Country Music Awards (a massively popular media event in its own right), launched the “How Do You Country?” sweepstakes. Here, by posting a certain picture depicting how one exemplifies the country lifestyle and tagging such a thing #ChevyCMAsweeps, users were automatically entered in for a chance to win exclusive, premium seats at the CMA awards ceremony, as well as tickets to a NASCAR race at the famous Texas Motor Speedway. This sweepstakes, of course, opened the doors for many Instagram users that would not otherwise be aware of Chevrolet’s brand.
For now, Chevrolet is putting an emphasis on its four mini, subcompact, subcompact crossover, and compact segments such as the Spark, Sonic, Trax and Cruze models, seeing as how 20 percent of Cruze buyers and 31 percent of Sonic buyers are under the age of 35. Naturally, visit us here at Apple Chevrolet to get more of the scoop on Chevrolet’s future sweepstakes as well as checking out our new Chevrolet models.
