• by Tanya Gazdik , October 24, 2019

Honda is taking its “Safety For Everyone” effort to social media.

The effort, from RPA, features actual Honda customers who were involved in serious collisions but walked away without series injury. They credit the performance of the Honda vehicle with saving their lives. 

The series, running across social media and video on demand through 2020, is the follow up to Honda’s “Safety for Everyone” TV spot that broke Sept. 20 and continues to air on broadcast.

Each social media story embodies the central theme from the brand spot, says Jessica Fini, social media manager, American Honda.

Social media enables Honda to go deeper with its storytelling and tell multiple stories, which is more challenging with a TV spot.

“The fact that so many customers have connected with Honda to share their stories via social media, makes social media even more relevant for sharing real Honda customer testimonials about their safety experiences,” Fini tells Marketing Daily.  

The videos direct viewers to a “Safety for Everyone” website where Honda engineers explain how they develop Honda vehicles to help protect customers in various collision scenarios, along with other safety information.

The first customer story featured in the new series involves Nicole Hart, who shared on Facebook and in a letter to Honda, that in April 2019, she reached for a tissue while driving her 2018 HR-V and found herself drifting into oncoming traffic. Hart’s vehicle hit the utility trailer towed by a pickup truck and her Honda HR-V rolled over multiple times. 

Hart walked away with only a sprained wrist and minor cuts and bruises, crediting the thoughtful engineering design of her Honda vehicle with her survival: “I truly believe your well-built vehicle saved my life,” she wrote. "I am grateful to those who designed and engineered my Honda HR-V.”

Additional videos in the Safety for Everyone Customer Stories series will be released in the coming weeks, featuring onscreen interviews with family members directly impacted by the safety and well-being of a Honda customer involved in a collision.

In addition to telling customer stories, the new creative shows a long line of falling dominos -- an artistic element popular on social media -- as a visual metaphor demonstrating how one collision can affect many people.

The entire ‘Safety for Everyone” brand campaign is meant to tap into human emotion, Fini says.

“The TV campaign focused on the emotion behind pedestrian safety, and the social campaign gets even deeper with real, human emotion as tied to collision safety as tied to real-life experiences,” she says.

The goal of the “Safety for Everyone” social campaign is twofold, she adds.

“From a brand perspective, we want to demonstrate to consumers the passion Honda has for creating products with advanced levels of safety,” Fini says. “The emotional stories we tell in the commercial and in our social media videos about real customers helps demonstrate the far-reaching effects of safety beyond those involved in a collision event. At the same time, some of the newer safety and driver-assistive technologies in our Honda Sensing system are less well understood and the campaign can help consumers see the benefits of these new technologies.”