Eight years after urging consumers to “Shift” their buying behavior when it comes to cars, trucks and minivans, Nissan North America is changing brand themes.
In a campaign that is scheduled to get under way on Saturday, Nissan North America, part of the Nissan Motor Company of Japan, will proclaim its mission is to provide “Innovation for all.”
The change will also bring more humor to Nissan advertising that has been evident recently: the addition of a sound at the end of each commercial, meant to symbolize the Nissan brand, and a new voice-over announcer for the commercials, the actor Robert Downey Jr.
Nissan is “rallying around innovation,” said Jon Brancheau, vice president for Nissan marketing at Nissan North America in Franklin, Tenn., as embodied by the Leaf, the mass-market electric car that the company is to bring out at the end of the year.
Leaf is “the poster child for innovation,” Mr. Brancheau said on Tuesday morning at an interview in New York, and as such will be “absolutely critical” to how the Nissan brand fares.
The new campaign, like its predecessor, is being created by the Los Angeles office of TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the TBWA Worldwide unit of the Omnicom Group.
Switching to a discussion of innovation is intended to convey a leadership position for the Nissan brand, said Rob Schwartz, chief creative officer at TBWA/Chat/Day Los Angeles, who joined Mr. Brancheau for the interview.
The goal is not to play up “innovation for innovation’s sake,” Mr. Schwartz said, but rather to concentrate on what he called “human-centric innovation,” as conveyed through displays of new products like the Leaf and the highlighting of features found on Nissan products.
In introducing a brand image campaign, Nissan North America joins a lengthening list of major marketers that includes AT&T and Procter & Gamble.
The trend signals that advertisers focused mostly on short-term sales during the worst of the economic downturn are beginning to raise their sights to the point where they want to also try burnishing brand images.
