Courtesy of Brands Bands Fans
Suzuki US is another motor brand seeking seeking to increase its appeal to the youth marketing via an underground campaign to promote its Hayabusa bike; Vauxhall did something similar early last year with the UK urban collective, Roll Deep Crew.
The idea is to find new rap talent across 12 cities, adn to showcase the music alongside the bike. Visitors can listen to the artists and sign up for mobile alerts as new songs are added. Graffiti campaigns in each citiy will also promote the bike, although they need to be careful and be more adidas than Sony with the graffiti.
The website will also be used to strengthen ties with the African American and Latino communities via rap battles and user-generated contests. Although the website looks absolutely pants.
Its a nice idea in principle but I think maybe the positioning of the campaign is slightly out; they would be better using more mainstream ‘aspirational’ rap artists, where the lifestyle promoted is a bit more bling…there’d be more relevance for the product, and also a slightly wider audience that would include middle class white Americans as well.