Case Study: Land Rover Onelife
Few brands are as well traveled and adventurous as Land Rover, and Land Rover Onelife is, in its own words, a truly global project with a worldly view, regularly heading to the ends of the Earth in search of a good story. It uses beautiful imagery and combines high-profile contributors with stories “you won’t find in any other automotive customer magazine.” Deputy editor Christa Larwood found the time to tell us how they keep this thing on the road.
communicating Land Rover’s brand values
Land Rover Onelife is a biannual 68-page magazine that goes to owners of Land Rovers and Range Rovers bought in the last three years (they can opt out of receiving it). It’s seen as a benefit of owning a Land Rover – they can view parts of the magazine online at www.landrover.co.uk/onelife. The client’s brief is that the magazine must reflect the adventurous, gutsy, yet premium heart of the brand.
We translate the magazine into eight languages and distribute it to over 60 countries. It’s a full-time job; we don’t get any downtime. For each country we include a combination of global content and some pages with local news and information, which we source through local agencies. We also prepare pages here to appear in foreign-language editions.
The audience for Onelife is existing customers, so our remit is to build the brand, not sell directly. We create editorial using a lifestyle approach based on the brand values. Our tone is “the Freelander 2 enables us to go to an amazing place, exemplifying the Land Rover spirit,” not “we drove the Freelander 2 from A to B.” The characteristics of the brand are based on six “pillars” we all innately understand: authentic, adventurous, worldly, gutsy, premium, and sustainable. These are fantastic characteristics to editorialize, and all the values lend themselves to interesting content. As Land Rover is all about adventure and travel, it’s easy to do a good job.
We have space for four advertisements and include products such as Bang & Olufsen, which reflect our magazine and associate well with the Land Rover brand.
The Approach:
taking the editorial to extremes
The editorial team challenges itself to produce the most adventurous, unique stories possible. Onelife has explored Northern Canada’s Barren Lands on a road made of ice, journeyed to the blistering heat of the Libyan Sahara to catch a total solar eclipse, and dealt with Bolivian revolutionaries setting off pipe bombs in the middle of a shoot.
In the last year, editor Zac Assemakis has pushed the magazine further than ever, particularly in its structure and content. A good example is with the editorial treatment of the new Freelander 2. Instead of communicating this new product in a conventional way, Zac decided to represent different features of the vehicle through a series of different stories, so the car’s interior was highlighted with a travel story “on the inside” of a hotel converted from a prison in Oxfordshire; the car’s styling was showcased with an exciting illustrated car chase created by a renowned US graphic artist.
We sometimes throw out all of the sections and dedicate the magazine to a theme: for example, we did a Paradise issue and a Carbon Neutral issue. As we publish just twice a year there isn’t much time for the customer to build a relationship with the magazine and elements within it, so we can be flexible and do it slightly differently each time.
The majority of the team is in-house and we have a number of external contributors to each issue. This adds variety and allows us to feature specialists and authorities – for example, we wanted to send someone to the edge of space and used Andrew Smith, who’d written a book on people who have walked on the moon. For our Paradise issue we sent Kevin Rushby, who has written a book about paradise, on a search for Utopia in the US.
The client gives us a lot of freedom; we’re very lucky. They appreciate good editorial and we tend to have only a few corrections. There’s a more rigorous sign-off when we’re involving Land Rover itself, but even this is usually mild. The client is sophisticated, not banging on about putting cars in everywhere!
The Result:
the magazine is helping to lead the brand communications
We want people to keep the magazine, and research shows we have a good retention, as readers keep it for a month or more and show it to others too. We measure our effectiveness with reader surveys; it is claimed that six percent of Land Rover customers bought or upgraded their Land Rover as a result of reading Onelife, a huge statistic for a customer magazine, showing what an effective medium it is.
The Association of Publishing Agencies has all sorts of statistics about customer magazines, and has awarded Onelife its “customer magazine of the year” title. Surveys show it’s considered a compelling read, as indicated by 75 percent of respondents, and showcasing the Freelander 2 was very effective: 23 percent of respondents requested a test drive as a direct result of reading the magazine. Overall, 52 percent of respondents took some action, compared to a 38 percent automotive average.
Land Rover is a story-telling brand, and the Onelife team “gets” the brand, probably because we’ve spent such a long time working with it. Land Rover is moving away from traditional views, and Onelife is seen as representing this – the magazine is doing absolutely what it should be.
