Some 20% of new vehicles in the U.S. are sold to Latino-Americans, and Kia Motors America Inc. wants to be a household name in the fast-growing segment of the car market.
“We want to raise the Hispanic consumers’ perception and awareness of the brand,” said Candelaria Powell, Kia’s multicultural marketing manager. “We find in a lot of research that the Hispanic community loves the product but doesn’t really know a whole lot about the brand. We want them to see a car down the street and not wonder, ‘Hey, who’s that? Oh, that’s a Kia.’ ”
The Irvine-based brand will blend a couple of trends as it seeks a new status with Latino-Americans, counting on a Spanish-language online reality show with product placement crafted into the plot. Kia is sponsoring Telemundo’s new Web series, “El Maestro: Unplugged,” starring Latin Grammy winner Luis Enrique. The 10-episode series follows three up-and-coming artists who are mentored by Enrique, all while cruising to locations in a 2016 Kia Sorrento and 2015 Kia Soul.
“There is a lot of vehicle integration during the show,” Powell said. “We see them driving and talking about their upcoming performances.”
Telemundo, a division of NBCUniversal Hispanic Enterprises and Content, approached Kia with the concept for the show. The automaker’s internal marketing team then “built it and filmed it together” with the broadcaster’s production crews.
The first three episodes aired on May 21, followed by six more that led to this week’s finale scheduled for June 11.
“We’ve had great feedback—people are really engaging with the content (online),” she said. “They are familiar with who Luis Enrique is. He’s been in the music industry for a long time, so he is well known and well respected. And the videos are great. It doesn’t just connect in the culture—it also relates to them from a music perspective, which is something that is very important to the Hispanic community.”
Market Shares
That’s a two-way street for Kia, which sees room to grow sales in the segment. The automaker claimed 4.6% of total new-vehicle sales to Latino-Americans last year, according to U.S. vehicle registration data collected by IHS Inc.’s Polk research division in Englewood, Colo.
That’s slightly ahead of Kia’s overall market share—it accounted for 3.5% of total U.S. auto sales last year, when it sold 580,234—but there’s plenty of room to grow. Kia currently holds the No. 6 spot among Latino-American car buyers, well behind three Japan-based brands: Toyota Motor Corp. with a share of 16.9% of the Latino-American segment; Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. at 12.3%; and Honda Motor Co. at 11.9%. Kia also trails General Motors Co.’s Chevrolet brand, which accounted for 9.2% of all sales to Latino-Americans, and Ford Motor Co., which took 8.5% of the pie.
Fountain Valley-based Hyundai Motor America Inc.—a sister brand to Kia under South Korea-based parent Hyundai Kia Automotive Group—placed No. 7 with 4.5% of the market share.
Kia’s bid to move up the ladder in the segment includes add-ons to its deal for the online series.
The sponsorship includes a Kia-branded custom landing page for “El Maestro” within Billboard En Espanol, a Spanish-language version of Billboard Magazine hosted on telemundo.com. A social media component includes weekly posts by Kia and Billboard on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
“With Hispanics over-indexing on online video consumption, we felt that sponsoring ‘El Maestro’ offered a tremendous opportunity to communicate and interact with the Hispanic community in authentic and meaningful ways,” said Tim Chaney, Kia’s vice president of marketing communications.
Kia hasn’t shunted broadcast TV to the side. It remains a sponsor of the “Nuestra Belleza Latina,” a beauty pageant reality show produced and aired by Spanish-language TV network Univision Communications.
The automaker signed on in March 2013, giving away a Kia Forte to the winner. This season’s contestants are taking photos with a lime green Kia Soul, a vehicle popular among Millennials.
“We take a look at who are the people that are going to be watching the show, and we try to match the vehicle with the demographics of the viewers,” Powell said. “In the case of the Soul, it was the age and the household income [of audience and contestants on the ‘El Maestro’ show]. With Luis Enrique, we felt because he is a Latin Grammy winner, we wanted to put him in our Sorento, because it’s such a great car.”
‘More Opportunities’
Kia is “looking for more opportunities to be online” to engage Latino-Americans in 2016. It also plans to continue a “strong broadcast (media) purchase” it launched in 2012 on Telemundo.
“The Hispanic audience has a tendency to do both, so we are not walking away from TV,” Powell said. “We think it’s an important medium to continue our presence there, but we do want to do other things as they come up that are on the digital or social side.”
She declined to disclose the automaker’s marketing budget for the upcoming year.
Kia spent about $420 million on media placements last year, according to New York-based Kantar Media. Latino-Americans accounted for 9.3% of all Kia purchases in 2013.
