Nissan was an early leader in the EV space with LEAF but had not launched a new electric nameplate in the US in over 20 years. When it came to releasing their latest electric SUV: the ARIYA, Nissan was the last to market, had the lowest nameplate awareness, and the lowest Google search intent in the Compact SUV EV category. As a result, the ARIYA was so unknown, most didn’t even know how to pronounce “ARIYA”. The brief and objective was simple: make the ARIYA to be a household name on par with their other vehicles: LEAF, Sentra, Altima, etc.

Knowing some customers were confused about how to pronounce “ARIYA,” we began a mission to make ARIYA a name nobody could forget – by enlisting the TikTok community to help create a dominant trend. First we sought help from celebrities with commonly mispronounced names (Idina Menzel, Anna Faris, Tua Tagovailoa, Josh Duhamel, Bam Adebayo, and Quinn XCII) to advocate for ARIYA’s correct pronunciation. Then we tapped into an existing TikTok trend of pronunciation challenges by creating a fun AR filter where you use your head (literally) to show how you pronounce certain words (e.g. GIF or JIF?)–with “ARIYA” being featured in the first three words. Finally we used TikTok’s Branded Mission tool to recruit thousands of creators to use the filter and help the challenge gain momentum. While we couldn’t quickly bring the ARIYA to their fingertips, we were set on putting it at the tip of their tongues.

ARIYA faced an uphill battle: launched months after its main competitors - Ford Mustang Mach E, VW iD.4, Hyundai IONIQ 5, and Kia EV6 - it badly lagged those vehicles in share of online searches: with only a 2% share of search in December 2022. To catch the competition we needed a way to reach a large number of Americans fast. While many people think of TikTok as a Gen Z habitat, we saw an opportunity to reach millions of Millennials on the platform – ideal for ARIYA which was targeted at younger, affluent, tech-lovers who are more willing to try an EV. We also believed we could impact more people on TikTok via a “bottom-up” strategy, engaging the community to spread our message vs a “top down” strategy of buying ads that TikTok users rapidly skip; all we needed was an idea that felt native to the platform.

We started by hiring celebrities with difficult names and had them record a video teaching our audience how to say their name, and how to say ARIYA. These celebrity videos were the basis for a series of paid TikTok and Instagram ads that spoke to the social media community. We then created what TikTok calls a “Branded Mission” – a crowdsourcing tool that we used to recruit a massive community of creators. Each creator was briefed to create a #HowDoYouSayARIYA video with our custom-built pronunciation challenge AR filter. After receiving thousands of TikToks from the community, we chose our favorites and promoted them with paid media to extend their reach. With this challenge now appearing on people’s For You Pages, thousands more TikTok creators wanted to jump on the trend, creating a positive feedback loop of reach and engagement, resulting in our challenge becoming a top trending topic on TikTok.

Nissan successfully turned #HowDoYouSayARIYA into a TikTok trend, receiving over 175MM views on TikTok, eclipsing the original #HowDoYouSay trend (37MM views).

People couldn’t get enough of the AR filter: over 20,000 TikToks were created using the filter (2,400+ paid creators, 17,600+ user-generated). Each creator played with the filter for an average of 83 seconds; a total cumulative playtime of over 10,000+ hours.

Our top 20 pronunciation videos – including both the celebrity and paid creator TikToks – attracted over 5MM engagements (likes, comments and shares).

The #HowDoYouSayARIYA campaign contributed to an incredible business turnaround for ARIYA; Google searches for ARIYA increased 437% (overtaking competitor vehicles like KIA EV6, VW iD.4 and Hyundai IONIQ 5); and ARIYA sales increased 14X compared to the previous quarter.