In the Middle East – a region where thousands of people rely on the mid-sized pickup as a dependable workhorse – it can be challenging to reimagine the Ranger as more than a work vehicle but also a vehicle designed, engineered and equipped to meet the uncompromising demands of its adventure-seeking customers.
“Living the Ranger Life is an easy concept to grasp for many markets in IMG where it is seen as a lifestyle vehicle, but we’re not quite there yet in the Middle East,” said Pedro Simoes, marketing director for Ford Middle East. “Over recent years, our focus has been on fleet customers; however, our shift to top-end retail customers means we need to build our Ranger lifestyle strategy from scratch.”
As the Middle East team readied for the regional launch of the new Ranger in May, Pedro said that it was obvious that closer collaboration between the marketing department and the communications team was going to be key in delivering a successful event.
“Normally we would run things in parallel. Comms would run the ride and drive event for media and content creators, and marketing would create its own campaigns and collaborations with influencers and media agencies,” Pedro explained. “But we wanted to challenge and hold ourselves to a higher standard and think of better and more innovative ways of working.”
He said the real light bulb moment came when Pedro and Kiko Roest, FCSD and fleet marketing manager, realised that collaborating with Rasha (Ghanem – communications director, Middle East) and Rania (Al-Shurafa, communications manager, Middle East) would not only make their ride and drive event more successful, but it meant marketing also could use the event to create impactful content with some of these same influencers and media in a much more organic and natural way.
“It really was a coming together of minds,” Rasha explained. “We’ve built this level of trust and collaboration with the marketing team over time, and they believe that what we do creates excellence and generate great results in a really genuine way.”
To raise the bar for May’s Ranger launch, Pedro said the event had to be memorable. It had to be packed with Instagram-able moments that appealed to the media and influencers. It had to be held in a picture-perfect location that inspired creativity. It needed to reflect the kind of Ranger lifestyle elements the Middle East team wanted to build on. And it had to involve distributors from around the region, to help keep the passion and advocacy for the Ranger brand alive.
The launch location, King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast, was chosen for its natural beauty and access to areas where the Ranger could really be tested to its limits in a safe and controlled environment.
“We really focused on creating moments that gave our guests the opportunity to produce something unique or different. From the elaborate location we used to reveal the Ranger, to the drive programme that was tailored for each group, we really pushed ourselves and our agency partners to focus on these wow moments so that our guests could create amazing content,” Pedro explained.
While collaboration between the marketing and communications teams was key to the success of the launch, the team also relied heavily on its sales and engineering teams and their relationships with its distributor network in the region to ensure there was a wide choice of Ranger variants for the media to drive, and vehicles for the support crews.
From a marketing perspective, Pedro said the event was an enormous success.
“Was it a risk to focus our initial launch efforts on one big moment? Yes, it was,” he said. “But it was an incredibly efficient way to create a bank of content that will continue to sustain our Ranger launch programme for the next six months. When you also consider the buzz we generated and the coverage we got from the media, it was an extremely cost-effective way of achieving our objectives and delivering on Ford Behaviours.”
