• by Tanya Gazdik , 10 hours ago

Lexus is evolving its longtime “Experience Amazing” global tagline to add “The Standard of Amazing.” 

“Luxury is not just about craftsmanship, it's also about inspiring feelings and emotions,” says Cynthia Tenhouse, vice president, Lexus guest experience, at Toyota North America. “And when our vehicles make people feel exhilarated, inspired and confident, we know we hit our mark. We call this target the standard of amazing.”

The new campaign includes multiple vehicle brands and focuses on driving desire for Lexus as a brand, beyond just the individual vehicle models that it makes.

“The Lexus brand needs to be bigger than any model,” Tenhouse tells Marketing Daily. “We wanted to build a bridge to ‘Experience Amazing’ to create more meaning around it.”

The brand spots feature “halo” models that help to drive desirability for the overall brand and attract younger affluent consumers — the next generation of buyers, she says. 

“It can be tempting, I think, to advertise based on what you have the most inventory of and like, okay, we need to move RX or ES, but that's not going to create brand desire,” Tenhouse says. “So we're advertising models and there may be very few [of them] available. But it's ‘okay, how do we make Lexus as a brand really awesome and sexy and desirable?’”

For the first time, all creative across agencies will feature the smooth and sultry voiceover of actor Blair Underwood. He replaces actor Gains Charles, who was hired in October 2021 to take the place of Minnie Driver, who had the voiceover gig for almost five years, dating back to the 2017 Super Bowl.  

“We love Blair's voice and we're like, why do we have two separate voices? This is silly,” Tenhouse says. “This brand campaign is kind of the culmination of some workshops where we wanted to bring together our multicultural and general market advertising and communications.”

This campaign is a change from the creative process Lexus and its agencies have used previously, which involved piecemeal creation and review of work.

“We would agree coming out of the clinic, here's the platform,” she says. “But then it kind of went in different directions.... So we said, ‘Hey, we need to change, not just better define what the brand is, but we also need to change our process. So that when I'm sitting down, I'm not reviewing Black work, and then three weeks later I'm reviewing Asian work. We need to see them all together and make sure [they work] conceptually, before we go and shoot anything or create any assets."

The debut spot from Walton Isaacson, “Reaching a Higher Standard,” features not only the voice of Underwood but the actor himself. He calls on consumers to challenge themselves in the pursuit of amazing.

“You've always been ahead of the game,” Underwood says in the voiceover, as he is shown writing in a journal. “For you, excellence isn’t a challenge, it’s a default. And Lexus knows that feeling is unmatched. Their standard isn't for the average. It's for those who set the bar -- and then elevate it.... Because a car that doesn't make you feel something, is a car that stops short of amazing.”

Team One created the national piece “No Such Thing,” debuting along with regional spots “Perfectionist,” “Found,” and “Recognized” that feature individual models (the NX, ES and RX, respectively.)

In “No Such Thing,” consumers are immersed in the exhilarating lifestyle that Lexus ownership is meant to inspire, ranging from the balance of design and performance to the parallels of surgical precision on track and artistic grace on stage.

“We believe what differentiates us is, we're a very human brand and we start with the guest in mind,” Tenhouse says. “So when we're building product, it's not just about what the chief designer wants to create, it's really very thoughtfully thinking about how will the end guest, our target guest use this vehicle? What's important to them? … So that's why that new language is there, and you're going to see that carry through everything that we do for the next several years.”