HYUNDAI | ASSURANCE | 2009
"You can give the car back" became a promise of trust / HYUNDAI "ASSURANCE"
It was 2009, right after the Lehman shock. In a time when nobody was buying cars, Hyundai said something strange: "If you lose your job within a year, you can give this car back." It was a promise nobody in the industry had ever made.
The problem
At the end of 2008, auto sales across the industry had dropped by more than three in ten. Discounts didn't work. Lower interest rates didn't work. People just weren't buying. When Hyundai looked into it, they found that what consumers feared wasn't the payments themselves, but whether they'd still have a job next month.
The insight
The problem wasn't the car's quality or its price. It was anxiety about the future. So instead of tinkering with the price, Hyundai decided to answer that anxiety directly.
The idea
They called it "Hyundai Assurance." If you lost your job because of the car you bought, you could return it without damaging your credit. Hyundai would also cover up to $7,500 of the difference in value. The program went from idea to dealerships nationwide in just 37 days, and was announced during the Super Bowl.
What happened
While the industry as a whole fell 37%, Hyundai nearly doubled its market share, with sales up 14%. By the end of that year, it had recorded its highest market share ever.
Afterthought
Apparently, only about 350 people actually used the program to return their cars. In other words, it cost the company almost nothing. And yet that one promise - "you can give it back" - was enough to push hundreds of thousands of people to buy. What works when people are anxious isn't a discount. It's a single line they can actually believe.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Grand Prix 2009
