In the textbooks, they’ll tell you that branding can profoundly impact consumer perception, foster customer loyalty and ultimately benefit the bottom line. I watched a real time demonstration of those marketing fundamentals play out at the release of the “Hello Kitty” Lumin EV at the Bangkok International Motor Show last week.
It’s hard not to applaud the bold nature of the EV brand Lumin working with “Hello Kitty” to produce an automobile because the brand values of both are so congruent and relevant.
The Lumin EV is a small 36-kW (48-hp) electric city car that seats four, and despite being as cute as a car can be, it comes from the toughest game in town – it has succeeded in differentiating itself from a battalion of similar Chinese EVs and has emerged ready for a crack at the world market.
In its standard form, the Lumin has been on sale in the Chinese domestic marketplace for exactly two years, having racked up sales of around 10,000 units a month for around a quarter million units shipped to date.
The Lumen has never quite cracked a spot in China's monthly top 10 best selling cars list, but it has been consistently close every month, and that puts it among the world’s top selling models every month for the last two years. The point that interested me most in the literature, was that three in four Chinese buyers were women.
The Thailand launch for the Lumin was the first outside China, so a special hero model was produced and big things were hoped for with the addition of Hello Kitty branding to 2,000 units to kick off Thai sales.
In a world where ubiquitous angertainment promotes disharmony and division, the adorable Kitty has been promoting friendship, inclusivity and kindness on school backpacks and baby beanies for 50 years. The ecology-saving intention of the car certainly gels with that, but the addition of the branding certainly focusses the mind on how well it does its job.
With a simple outward message on the car, everything becomes ever so congruent – respectful and friendly co-carriage with minimal damage to the environment.
“Hello Kitty” is such a simple yet potent brand, that as long ago as 1983, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) appointed her (Kitty White – Kitty is actually a little girl, not a cat) as the children's ambassador to the United States.
In 1994, UNICEF re-appointed her as a children's ambassador to her native Japan. When Hello Kitty celebrated her 30th Anniversary in 2004, she was effectively UNICEF’s spokesperson in an advocacy program to educate the developing world about gender-based discrimination in schooling. There are 10 million more girls than boys who are not attending school world-wide.
Just two years ago (2022), Kitty created a new product line at the United Nations Bookshop to celebrate her commitment to UNICEF’s Sustainable Development Goals.
That brand provenance represents serious credibility in the EV world to the EV buyer. It goes beyond good corporate citizenship. What began as a commercial brand has seemingly morphed into a modern day personification of the “peace” symbol that got to mean something else in the 1960s.
You can find lots of stories about the topsy-like growth of the “Hello Kitty” brand over the last 50 years, but the statistics show there are now hundreds of millions of devotees, and most likely many more that once had a direct contact with the brand through being a child or having children, that over time it became an adult brand too.
You might have worn the logo as a child. It turns a parka or a set of gloves you might otherwise not wear, into a deeply loved companion that you will wear, and the vast availability of any childrenswear product with the logo has turned it into a designer label for kids, which in turn has driven further popularity.
Beyond that, given Kitty’s association with love and kindness and nurturing, the chances are that you have been given one or more Kitty-branded products and spent a lot of time with your Kitty lunchbox, Kitty cushion or other familiar, safe objects keeping you company.
Kitty is a companion that has consistently delivered a responsible message to the children of the world. When a Taiwanese hospital wanted to create a safe space for children, they found that Hello Kitty branded rooms did the trick. There are now Hello Kitty hotel rooms for people traveling with kids, and Hello Kitty theme parks.
For manufacturers of anything targeting kids and women, a licensing fee of three percent adds minimally to the cost of getting a product to the point of sale, but is meaningless given the additional sales and scale it brings.
Hello Kitty licensing fees topped US$8 billion last year. The standard 3% licensing fee means the logo sold on $267 billion worth of goods and services to generate that cashflow.
That’s why there are more than 50,000 different licensed “Hello Kitty” products on sale somewhere in the world, and many more who pirate the designs to make their goods more valuable.
Until now, however, three whole percent has been way too rich for the automotive market.
Three percent is an obese margin in the auto business, so despite half a century of success in turning everything else it has touched into gold, no manufacturer has previously turned out an “Hello Kitty” automobile.
This is Lumin (Changan) having the covers ripped off for the first time.
Not surprisingly, the “Hello Kitty” branding on a car that is ultra-cute to begin with, had an arresting impact on kids and women, with more than a few males watching quietly in deep contemplation. I feel certain that everyone I watched congregating around the car already had a relationship with the brand… and hence the car.
I spied the Lumin “Hello Kitty” model on the Changan stand at last week’s Bangkok Motor Show and was initially attracted by the crowd it had gathered.
I’d been on the show floor for an hour when I saw the “Hello Kitty” car but I’d already seen limited editions aplenty.
There was an “Angry Birds” minicar, the “Donald Duck 90th birthday” scooter, the Filo Yamaha and the matching “Star Wars” Monkey bikes. With each one, I bypassed it and made a mental note to return when I had some time to get pictures unobstructed … once the herd had thinned.
At the end of my first pass of the entire show, I listed what I needed to go back to, and it was all the special editions … and the herd never thinned around the limited editions.
They’re all identical to the standard model except for skin-deep adornment, so they really don’t cost much more to make, but the special editions got ALL the attention at the show, and at last count, they’d all been sold, at a premium.
The automotive industry learned the limited-edition trick a few decades ago, realizing that people will pay more for something they can relate to, that makes them feel special, that was built to their taste and values, that had partnered with their signature brand … all those tribal groups could be targeted successfully enough with a limited edition to make it worth doing again and again.
Now we have special editions proliferating across the entire mobility sector and the era of mass personalization is beginning to dawn.
The numbers that will prove the success of the Hello Kitty Lumin have not yet been written, because its destiny will be determined by how well it fares in the international markets it is beginning to enter in 2024 and 2025, and whether it becomes the mainstay of a giant production facility in the Philippines that comes online in 2025.
Hence the immediate sale of a limited edition of 2,000 automobiles in a developing marketplace might easily get lost in the numbers the auto industry writes daily worldwide, but it was much more significant than that.
The resonance of the Hello Kitty brand with women and children was so obvious, that it really highlighted the compelling nature of the car. Four seats, capable of achieving the speed limit on a motorway, structurally sound by any metric, far more achievable mobility than ever before … and an old family friend.
Research shows that women have long been the key decision makers in the majority of automotive purchases and with children added to that, good luck with that third vote if you’re a family man.
The resonance of the Hello Kitty Lumin with the target audience was so powerful that it warrants retracting the "limited edition" tag and substituting of the words "special edition."
Cars that look like this are good for the world's mental health - they should be made more freely available.
There are plans afoot for the Changan range to enter America in the next few years. A Hello Kitty Lumin might be closer than you think.
