Kia partners with all-female mariachi band to celebrate Latina entrepreneurs

Dive Brief:

Kia Motors America unveiled a new campaign for its 2019 Kia Forte featuring Latin Grammy award-winning, all-female mariachi band Flor De Toloache and a digital video series celebrating Latina business owners, per details provided to Marketing Dive.
The campaign, created with Hispanic agency Inspire, features the band traveling across country in the 2019 Fort, surprising Latina entrepreneurs and performing its latest single "Indestructible," which will be available on Spotify beginning Nov. 9. The video series features three Latina entrepreneurs sharing their stories of struggle and success as small business owners. Kia also provided a laptop to each entrepreneur to help their businesses grow.
Kia is rolling out 15- and 30-second videos to support the push, which will be shared on Kia Latino's social channels, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and on the campaign's website.

Dive Insight:

Kia is embracing several themes in its new campaign, including diversity, entrepreneurship and female empowerment. Highlighting Latina business owners and entrepreneurs is timely, as the campaign launched around Latina Equal Pay Day on Nov. 1. The day serves to highlight the estimated amount of time a woman of Latin American descent would have to work — roughly 10 months and one day of 2018 and all of 2017 — to make what white men typically earned in 2017 alone. On average, Latina women earn 53 cents for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men, per Labor Council for Latin American Advancement data included in an ABC News report.

Documentary-style video series are growing more popular among marketers, as brands are experimenting with high-quality video content that resonates with audiences. Featuring real-life entrepreneurs lends elements of authenticity to the campaign that could help Kia connect with Hispanic and Latino audiences, which are key but often overlooked segments for auto brands. The number of cars purchased by Hispanic consumers in the U.S. is projected to double from 2010 to 2020, and new car sales to Hispanic consumers is expected to grow by 8% over the next five years despite an overall 2% drop in the market, according to Univision research cited in MediaPost.

Kia isn't the only auto brand ramping up targeting of these demographics. Last year, Mazda unveiled a digital-first extension of its Driving Matters campaign centered around Hispanic drivers, tapping into an affinity for Japanese-made products among the segment and working with Spanish-language media outlets like Telemundo and Univision. Honda also rolled out an integrated campaign for its 2018 Fit Sport model last year aimed at diverse millennial audiences, specifically Hispanic and African-American consumers.

Consumers are expecting brands to feature more diversity and embrace important causes in their marketing messages. More than half of Hispanic consumers, or 57%, say they are more likely to purchase from brands that support causes that they care about, over-indexing non-Hispanic white consumers by 9%, according to recent Nielsen research. Forty-three percent of those surveyed reported they expect brands to support social causes, over-indexing by 26%.