In 2018 J.D. Power reported that 29% of new vehicles were bought by millennials, and projects that by 2020, millennials will be responsible for 40% of new car sales overall.

Millennials came of age with the internet, and are early adopters of technology.

59% of them admit to being influenced in their buying decision by Instagram (Path to Purchase” by Kantar) but are reluctant to visit a showroom, an experience often marred by tedious negotiations and lengthy holding patterns with disingenuous salespeople.

Therefore, to launch the new Renault Captur Tokyo Limited Edition in a crowded market led by Italian automotive brands, we needed to break the rules of classical automotive storytelling & selling, ultimately redefining the customer journey.

Tokyo Stories: an interactive Instagram Stories in manga style through which it was possible to interact, via Facebook Messenger, with a character's chatbot and directly buy the car on the platform. An entirely new experience for users, on the border between fiction and reality.

The campaign objective was to address millennials, clustered in 4 target audiences according to their interests that were relevant for the car: Urban, Tech, Custom Cars fan and Manga Lovers.

Considering that Millennials visit IG on an average of 13 time per day and 59% say that they are influenced by IG when buying a car, we leveraged the platform developing the campaign through the whole funnel. In the conversion phase we developed different messages according to different custom audiences created using messenger interactions.

In the first week we released a series of immersive Manga stories, each one specifically designed to attract the 4 target audiences. In doing so, we took our audiences on a journey within a functionalized, nocturnal version of Tokyo where they could see the car in action and interact with a “mysterious” man on FB Messenger Bot where they could buy one of the 100 limited edition SUVs.

In the conversion phase, we pushed sales retargeting those who interacted with the Bot without finalizing the purchase, to hurry to buy one of the 100 cars before they sold out.

3 cars have been sold in first 24 hours, opening a new sales channel in the automotive business for the first time.

In as long as an Instagram story lasts, we sold 3 cars , and all 100 limited edition cars in 30 days.

Strong lift on brand awareness (12pt), especially compared to the EMEA Region (3.6pt) and the

Automotive Vertical (5.4pt).

Mobile first creativities (vertical, short and original content) helped to reach people Instagram (7.2M), moving 9 point lift in ad recall, with a strong movement on 18 -34 y.o.

The first car purchase experience entirely on Instagram.