Adwatch: Kia Sportage - 'Warriors'

by Giles Hedger, Head of planning, Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy, Marketing 10-Aug-05

I'm sure no one reads this column more avidly than the individuals responsible for the ads, so can I start by saying to them how deliciously unlike car advertising this is.

Planning-wise, I can't think of a more imaginative point of entry into
'fortress automobile' than this in recent years. As for execution, it is
a joy to be tickled and amused by a car proposition, rather than mown

down in a charge of adrenaline, or drowned in a tide of aspiration. This

Kia ad deserves applause.

It goes without saying that this campaign enjoys some of the luxuries
afforded only to small-share players, but when is the last time you
remembered a car commercial because you couldn't free your mind of
hordes of Viking reindeer (my interpretation), who go chasing and
squeaking after the Kia Sportage as it taunts them with its four-wheel
drive? And all of this in a world so unlike the native landscape of the
SUV that you suspend whatever prejudice you may have had against
kangaroo-killing, gas-guzzling hybrids.

The Kia strategy seems to be to enter lots of segments, winning modest
share in each with a 'why have that when you can have this?' argument.
Intriguingly, it has chosen as its competitors other less appealing
segments in the same price bracket, rather than like-for-like
alternatives. 'For £14,500, why have a hatchback when you could
have one of these?'

This creates a better story for Kia than it might, were other SUVs the
benchmark, and it gives it a great leaping-off point for the
advertising, the principal duty of which is to open such an unlikely
window in your mind that you begin to agree that there is a better way
of looking at £14,500.

A Kia Sportage may not be best in its class, I don't know. But the
take-out is that it is a hell of a lot smarter than the squeaky hordes
who can't quite keep up. What's more, compared with the Viking reindeer
and their strikingly low driving position, sheep-like sense of direction
and doomed-to-fail acceleration, the whole impression is suitably nippy
and high off the ground. I'm no petrolhead - in fact I'm scarcely a
lead-free amateur - but I am guessing that these are good things to
communicate.