CARVANA 2018 - 2019
CARVANA 2018 - 2019
Business challenge: Sustain triple-digit growth, scaling the business while solidifying the competitive moat earned through first-mover and innovative product offerings.
Marketing challenge: Drive the demand necessary to sustain aggressive growth, building awareness of the business and understanding of its differentiating value props.
Brand challenge: Build legitimacy and trust in an unknown, first mover, in a new category disrupting the way people have purchased cars for 70+ years.
Solution: Clear, product-focused creative, highlighting the most impactful value props and legitimizing brand assets.
Results: 99% growth in sales from Q118 to Q119.
Jump-starting our growth
In 2018, Carvana was in the infancy of its national marketing planning. Even in the markets where we’d operated for years, awareness was low and national awareness was even lower. However, the business had expanded to the point where market-based buys were inefficient and growth aspirations supported a more holistic approach. As the media spend was shifted to a national cable buy, it was time to reexamine the messaging.
The creative work done to date had taken a brand-first approach, highlighting the brand’s unique personality and suggesting how Carvana might be better than the “old way” of buying a car at the dealership. Musical spots with the taglines “That Didn’t Suck” and “I’d Do Anything…” were high on entertainment, but low on details and performance.
We knew that customers loved our product and experience. Our NPS score was in the 80’s and our 4.7-star customer rating captured the total satisfaction of shopping with Carvana, driven by the 100% online shopping experience. So in summer of 2018, to complement our new national media plan, we tested a new spot, product-driven creative to clearly spell out what made shopping at Carvana so much better.
The spot was an immediate success, driving a significant lift in response rate and immediately reducing key cost-pers. We attributed success to the clarity of the message, a product-focused story with on-screen text to reinforce key messages.
While not necessarily a “brand” spot, the creative featured key, differentiating brand assets which built overall brand equity and awareness. Brand-legitimizing elements like the vending machine, the hauler and our spinner tech would be key visuals in many future spots, along with other infrastructure elements which we believed would help highlight the size of the business and build trust amongst consumers.
Moving quickly to build on our success, we dove into the development of four new retail spots, digging into the value props which, through focus-group learnings, we understood to be our most compelling benefits: the 7-day test-own, cost savings when shopping online, car quality and customer service. We didn’t need all of these spots to “hit,” but by spreading our chips around the board and making only moderate investments into this TV content, we could test & learn our way into continued success. We ran the work, optimizing creative allocations to boost better performing work, but keeping all the work in-market to help build a lasting understanding of the brand and our benefits.
We started to release these spots in late 2018 and into the spring of 2019. Our :30’s ran across broadcast, OTT and digital video, with bespoke edits and versions created for mobile.
By the start of Q119, you could start to see the impact of this work on sales, as we achieved 99% growth over Q118. Through 2019 we build in our learnings, optimizing the work and exploring new extensions for this content online.
