Case Study

Hyundai i30 European Car Of the Year Campaign

The Challenge

My Hyundai Motor Global PR team and I were given a challenge by top management: Get our new i30 hatchback on the European Car of the Year (COTY) shortlist. These are finalists that would vie for the coveted award.

Problem #1

The first hurdle: Hyundai had never put a car on the European COTY shortlist, partly because we hadn’t made one good enough to make the list but also because of the European bias against Asian automakers.

Problem #2

The second hurdle: The best way to win a COTY, aside from making a great car, is to make sure all the automotive journalists who vote for the award drive your car and get to spend a lot of time in it. They already had. Hyundai Motor Europe had done a stellar job at putting journalists in the i30.

So then, what more could we, at Hyundai headquarters in Seoul, do to persuade COTY voters?

The Beginning of An Idea

The first step was easy: Bring them to Seoul. Let them see our headquarters and our impressive R&D facility and talk to our executives and product planners. But that wouldn't be enough. We had to find a way to make them connect with the new i30.

A short backstory: In Europe, the VW Golf rules as the undisputed monarch of vehicles. It wins European COTY awards on a regular basis. To create our new i30, we had audaciously benchmarked the great Golf. Our aim was to elevate our pervious i30 — a perfectly acceptable if ho-hum value-for-money car — to Golf level.

We thought we had done it. But how to prove that to the COTY voters? How could we own our story?

We thought about exploding the car into its various parts at our R&D center and giving the journalists an inside-out view of all of the new i30’s innovations. But that proved logistically tough — no one wanted to take apart a car! — and it was missing something: The extraordinary effort that our engineers and product planners had put into the new i30. They had taken the Golf benchmark to heart.

The Idea Forms

So our PR team chose three of the new i3o’s most eye-popping features and interviewed the engineers and product planners who worked on them. We call this story mining — every company or organization has terrific stories within in. You just have to dig to find them.

We helped the engineers and product planners craft short, emotional narratives about the time and blood they’d put into their job. Remember — these were not native-English speakers, so the effort they made to craft and learn a story in English was incredibly brave.

After our last press briefing with the visiting journalists, we ushered them out of a conference room into a side room.

The Groove

“Welcome to the i30 Lounge!” we said, opening the door to a darkened space where house music spun quietly. In the low club light, journalists saw a bar with alcohol-free blue cocktails (Hyundai’s brand color) and a video screen showing the new i30 in action.

Then we switched on the studio lights: Two i30s sat nose-to-nose, the new one and the previous generation. The contrast was shocking — it looked like an F-15 next to a biplane. The design and styling upgrade to the new model were obvious, but our job was to sell the journalists on the story of the new car.

One of the new i30’s most eye-popping features was a backup camera that extended from the rear hatch when the Hyundai H logo flipped up — very James Bond.

It turned out, there was a Hyundai engineer whose job it was to make sure the camera worked, regardless of road conditions.

The engineer, a young Korean woman who had never been asked to address an audience, much less in English, bravely stepped before the grizzled European journalists in the hot glare of the studio lights and told a compelling and sometimes hilarious story about spending several weeks of her life stuffed inside the new i30’s hatch, while the backup camera was tested. She was inside when the car was frozen, when it was heated to desert temperatures, when the hatch was pummeled with a fire hose, when the car backed up over bumpy test track. In the end, it was her job to make sure Hyundai H logo flipped up and the camera extended and retracted flawlessly every time every i30 owner shifted into and out of reverse.

When she finished, the hardened journalists gave her a round of applause. Not just for her performance, I felt, but because they finally began to grasp the hundreds of hours and personal sacrifice that went into making the car as good as we could make it.

The Result

We waited nervously after the COTY-voting journalists returned to Europe. Weeks passed. At last, the shortlist was released: The i30 had made it! It was a first for Hyundai in Europe and an essential step toward getting our brand taken seriously in the world’s most demanding auto market. In the end, the Hyundai Motor Europe PR team had done the heavy lift, but I like to think we helped closed the deal.