What is the background and context?

The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s Vision 2030 strategy aims to repudiate both the nation’s dependence on oil and its support of religious fundamentalism. One of the biggest tenets of his audacious plan is to stop the marginalization of women in Saudi Arabian society. The first and most dramatic step was the Royal Decree announced on 26th September 2017, which gave women the right to drive as of 26th June 2018.

With the new car market down over 20% in 2017 - 18, the decree had pundits rushing to predict a bright future for the new car market in Saudi Arabia. As context, Toyota dominated market share (32%), followed by Hyundai (21%). At 6%, Nissan was struggling to come at par with its equity in other markets of the region.

Expansion of the market was an opportunity Nissan couldn’t afford to miss.

Who is our target audience?

The Saudi women, mainly those in the 20 – 40 age band as they represented the largest segment. Research indicated that 82% of these women wanted to apply for their license and drive. At the same time, 72% of women mentioned that they are not confident about being an early adopter of driving. Most women were adopting a “wait and see” approach.

What was the challenge?

How can we get the Saudi women to get interested in Nissan when they were not confident of driving itself?

What was the insight that unlocked our strategic approach?

We wanted to understand what was causing to the low confidence among women. An official survey in October 2017 revealed that majority of women (61%) felt the change showed society progressing in the right direction, but only a minority of local men (32%) were willing to support women of the family driving – 26% were against it, with a further 42% undecided.

This negative (and neutral) sentiment was infiltrating the mainstream and fostering a sense of reluctance and hesitation.

This led to our strategic inflection point – to encourage Saudi women to take charge of the wheel, we needed to normalize the idea of women driving to all men in KSA.

What was the creative idea?

We decided to show the men in Saudi how important it is for the women in their lives, their wives, daughters, sisters & mothers to exercise their right to drive.

We created a campaign that started with a real-time post and evolved into a surprise driving lesson for many Saudi women – one that had the closest male members of their family showing them support & encouragement.

Why did the campaign succeed?

Unlike many other brands that focused on attracting the new female target segment to buy their cars, with the #SheDrives initiative, Nissan was able to bring about a fundamental shift in the attitudes and behaviors of both men and women in KSA around the hot topic of women driving. In turn, the brand got tremendous earned media, engagement & positive sentiment.