• by Nina Lentini , Staff Writer @Nina_Lentini, August 12, 2020

A scene from Hyundai's Hope on Wheels ad with CMO Angela Zepeda, inset.

Man, back in January, life was looking pretty darn rosy for Hyundai. It was coming off a great 2019 with a lineup of new vehicles and its launch of the 2020 Sonata on the Super Bowl, called "Smaht Pahk," would be ranked the highest-scoring non-luxury auto Super Bowl ad of all time by Ace Metrix. 

"We were attracting younger and wealthier buyers to the brand," Angela Zepeda, CMO of Hyundai Motor America, told Wednesday's Marketing:Automotive conference via Zoom. "We had a lot of wind at our back."

And then the bottom fell out in March. Remembering something John F. Kennedy once relayed about the word crisis in Chinese, that it is composed of two characters representing danger and opportunity, Hyundai created a three-step plan.

In the short term, it launched some business boosters like the Hyundai Assurance program that offered owners and customers who were having financial issues the opportunity to defer payments or to get up to six months of payments for if they lost their jobs. This messaging was out by March 20 and earned "enormous press and positive sentiment on social, Zepeda said.

Next, it focused on its corporate social responsibility by redirecting its Hyundai Hope on Wheels, in which a portion of U.S. sales goes to pediatric cancer research, to support drive-through COVID testing centers and hospitals. "We donated $4.4 million and supported 730,000 COVID-19 tests," she said, which also earned positive social sentiment during the spring.

Then, it consolidated dealers' digital retail tools into Shopper Assurance, whereby buyers could delay payments for 90 days, and home delivery options were made available to new car buyers. Also, it launched Clean Assurance, a set of guidelines and protocols for dealers to make sure cleaning and delivery of any vehicle would be done in a way to make customers comfortable. 

Sometimes, Zepeda admitted, "it felt like we were taking two steps forward and three steps back." But soon it saw there was a "huge pent-up demand" for cars. There were week over week gains in web traffic; in fact, last week Hyundai enjoyed the largest number of visits to its website. And there was a "huge rebound in visits to dealerships" with the highest coming in July.

Now, the brand is focused on product launches to come. In October, the newly redesigned Elantra will be out and in November or December, the Santa Fe facelift will be launched.

Zepeda left the audience with this advice: "Do the best you can with the information you have. Even if not 100% right, it's going to be okay."