
Do It With A Car That’s Not Yours
Nelka Tours
Issue 8 | September 2008
Agency
JWT Costa Rica
Creative Team
Christian Caldwell - General Creative Director ;Christian Caldwell - Copywriter;Alfredo Enciso - Art Director
Production Team
Grupo Produccion Creativa; Khalo - Director
Date
Summer 2007
Background
Nelka Rent-A-Car is a middle-size car rental company in Costa Rica. It has a fleet of about 200 cars and 10 offices in different parts of the country. Nelka wanted to rent out at least 80% of their fleet over the summer season. The challenge was how to compete against the huge advertising budgets their competitors were spending in order to attract foreign tourists.
Idea
The agency came up with the idea of targeting a different market, the one niche no one had yet taken advantage of - the national tourist. Their first step was to create a blog - costaricaholes.com. This was an independent site dedicated to the bad conditions of Costa Rican roads. Visitors were able to complain about the problem and upload their own pictures of the holes on the streets. After just 15 days, almost 1500 photos had been uploaded and it ranked as one of the top 10 sites in the country, getting around 30,000 clicks. For the second phase, the blog turned into the official website of Nelka Rent-A-Car.
The agency then launched a print campaign using the pictures people had uploaded onto the website. The copy read: ‘If you drive through Costa Rica, do it with a car that’s not yours. Nelka Rent-A-Car, special fares for residents’. The campaign went further with a direct mail action that was sent to a database created on the blog. The piece emulated a monopoly board from Costa Rica, which featured the hottest tourist destinations in the country, but with holes in the path. The multi-media campaign lasted for a month, with TV ads, print ads, DM and flyers attached to the bills of different car-body shops in the city."
Results
Nelka managed to rent out all of their cars, with national clients accounting for 95% of all renters. The result was way above the company’s expectations: Nelka Rent-A-Car has now identified and captured a new niche market.
Our Thoughts
I have always thought that knowing who your target audience is not is as important in communications as anything. Here, Nelka were persuaded to ignore all those incoming tourists awash with dollars and to concentrate on local holiday-makers. This is one of those ideas that looks so obvious, because at its heart is a genuine insight. The roads are just too bad to drive on in your own car. So drive someone else’s.