Chevrolet Is Keen To Get Through To The Kids On Social Media

Marketers today have their sights set on one core sector of society: Millennials.

Ah, yes Millennials. It’s a slap-dash term that brushes anyone born from 1980 to the early-2000’s with the same stroke (and it also sounds like it was cooked up in the basement of some evil lair chalk-full of cigar-smoking monkeys, but that’s neither here nor there).

But there’s actually a good reason why businesses want to get their message through to that broad swath of people: they now outnumber their baby boomer parents and grandparents, according to USA Today.

And companies like Chevrolet are keen to reach them through social media, the drink of choice for many Millennials.

For example, Chevrolet has created a vast arsenal of social tools to build awareness and sales around some its less expensive models like the Spark, Sonic, Trax and Cruze.

“This generation now accounts for one-fourth of all new vehicle sales, and they didn’t grow up with many Chevrolets in their driveway,” Steve Majoros, Chevrolet marketing director for cars and crossovers, told the news outlet.

As you might imagine, the company is keen to squeeze its message through a vast spectrum of social outlets like Twitter, Vine, Tumblr, Snapchat, Instagram, and others to be sure.

Don’t go thinking you’re safe on Reddit, either; many companies have invested time in order to get their message–albeit in a more subtle form– onto the 10th most popular website in the country. And yes, most of them are a lot less obvious than the whole Rampart debacle.

Chevrolet’s current emphasis lies in the compact and subcompact segments because around 20% of Cruze buyers and 31% percent of Sonic buyers are under 35.

The question is, does it work? While it’s no doubt hard to correlate whether a specific ad triggers a purchase, the good news (for those pesky marketers) is that younger buyers are more inclined to purchase a Chevrolet even if their parents never owned one.

More than one third of Spark (39 percent), Sonic (36 percent), and Cruze (35 percent) buyers are new to Chevrolet.

And that’s business news you can use…if you’re a marketer.