Behind Lexus’ multicultural marketing approach, including its Black Panther partnership

Lexus came out with a new campaign last week called “Never Lose Your Edge.” Why did Lexus choose a segmented approach, creating ads that sought to appeal to different demographics?

It’s definitely not our first time doing that. I don’t know if we announced it differently this time than we have in the past. But if you take a look at our last several campaigns (such as our LX and NX campaigns), all of those campaigns leverage this same methodology. And that is, we know that we want to create an ad that appeals to what we call the “transcultural, affluent audience,” which (means that) the term “general market” doesn’t have the same connotation as it did in the past. The “general market” in the past was thought of as the non-Hispanic white audience only, and now it is inclusive of all audiences. We have, for the past several years, set out to create an ad that’s going to run in general market media to appeal to and leverage high-level insights across all audiences. 

We’re going to create ads that authentically resonate with our multicultural audiences, particularly containing insights for that audience only. (These) may translate across all audiences, but certainly the ads themselves were designed with insights for each one of those audiences. Those ads will run in targeted media. So for the Black audience, for example, that’s BET and OWN and TV One. For Hispanic it’s Univision and Telemundo. But they will also run in what’s considered to be the “general market” as well, because we understand that these ads, even though they’re created within insight for multicultural consumer audiences, are often very much appealing to what’s considered to be the “general market.”