A NEW AUDIENCE
Lexus hopes its prominent role in Marvel film will help it reach more diverse crowd,
SOUTHFIELD, MICHIGAN— In Marvel Studios’ upcoming Black Panther blockbuster, the superhero king of Wakanda surfs through a city clinging to the roof of his Lexus LC 500 supercar as his sister pilots it remotely.
The Toyota Motor Corp. brand is trying to use the excitement of that cameo to end a seven-year drought as the U.S. luxury sales leader.
The prominent role in the Walt Disney Co. movie, the first major superhero film to feature a Black actor in the lead role and a largely Black cast, is no accident, says Cooper Ericksen, Lexus’ vice-president of marketing. To succeed in shifting toward a more sporty, high-performance image, Lexus needs to reach a new audience.
“We are going after a younger customer, and just from a demographic standpoint, the younger you go, the more culturally diverse the population gets,” Ericksen said in an interview after showing Black Pantherthemed clips last week at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. “The task to hit our sales plan really comes from bringing a lot of new customers into the brand.”
As the U.S. shifts further away from a majority-white country and baby boomers age and retire, companies are scrambling to position themselves with younger buyers who are increasingly people of colour. Spending by Black, Asian and Hispanic consumers is growing faster than that of white consumers in the $19.5trillion U.S. economy. Black Americans in particular are frequent moviegoers.
The movie, set for release Feb. 16 in the U.S. and Canada, is expected to debut with weekend ticket sales of $120 million (U.S.) and take in $335 million during its domestic run in theatres, according to analysts at Box Office Pro, who have been raising their forecasts. That would make it one of the top 10 pictures of the year in the U.S. Advance sales set a record for a Marvel movie at Fandango.com. Disney’s hasn’t released its own forecast yet.
Marketing to minorities can be tricky, said Sonja Martin Poole, an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco, who conducts research on multicultural marketing and cited a recent H&M apparel ad that offended Black customers and had to be pulled.
Lexus has long courted those customers and won’t be seen as pandering, she said.
“There have been a lot of different brands that have made serious mistakes when trying to be inclusive or trying to attract African-American buyers,” said Poole, who plans to take her teenage sons to see the movie next month. “You just have to be
“You just have to be careful and you have to know your consumer.” SONJA MARTIN POOLE UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO MARKETING PROFESSOR
careful and you have to know your consumer and you have to come off as authentic. That’s really the trick.”
The idea for the Black Panther tiein came from Walton Isaacson, the agency Lexus uses for its marketing to Black and Hispanic consumers, Ericksen said. The campaign isn’t necessarily targeted at Black buyers as much as it is aimed at younger consumers, who are more likely to be people of colour, he said. About a third of Lexus customers are people of colour.
In addition to offering a special model of the Lexus LC with a colour inspired by the Black Panther, the automaker has the superhero appearing in a Super Bowl commercial for the upcoming LS sedan. Lexus aims to triple sales of that model this year, Ericksen said. Lexus trailed Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz brand in U.S. luxury sales in 2017 and hasn’t led the category since 2010.
Movie tie-ins for car companies are nothing new. James Bond has been driving Aston Martins since 1964, amid dalliances with other models. General Motors Co. vehicles, particularly the Chevrolet Camaro, have benefited from starring roles in Transformers pictures, and Audi, which is gaining on Lexus in U.S. sales, was Tony Stark’s mode of transportation in three Iron Man movies and Avengers: Age of Ultron.
And with spending by minorities growing faster than outlays by the white population, it makes sense to work with Hollywood studios on movies that appeal to those groups.
PepsiCo Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. partnered with 21st Century Fox Inc. in 2016 with Hidden Figures, about three Black women at NASA struggling to be recognized for their engineering work on the space program. The small-budget movie was a hit at the box office and was nominated for three Oscars.
Microsoft Corp. got great exposure for its Surface Pro computers, mobile phones and Bing search engine in the 2017 Universal Pictures hit Get Out, a horror film about a young Black man heading off for the weekend to meet his white girlfriend’s parents. The picture has earned $254.7 million in global ticket sales.
“I could see this being an investment in the younger market,” said Poole, the marketing professor.