Jeep, a brand known for pushing adventures in the wilderness, is getting an assist from the weather as it pushes the new Wrangler 4xe plug-in hybrid.
The brand, trying to get acquainted with the electric vehicle crowd, is displaying Wrangler 4xe ads on the screens of Volta charging stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles that change with the weather. Jeep is the first company to run a campaign using Volta’s weather technology.
The Volta stations have 55-inch screens that show the Wrangler with the top and doors off when the weather is sunny, with the slogan, “Embracing nature has never felt more natural.” When it’s cloudy, the doors and roof are on and the slogan says, “Charge ahead and take on the elements,” while lightning bolts flash in the background.
The campaign, which began this month and runs throughout July, shows how Jeep is adapting its messaging to appeal to a more environmentally conscious audience as the brand extends its reach into electrified vehicles. Jeep has been doing this by embracing the charging station itself as a platform, first with its own branded charging stations at nature trails and now with the weather-based content on the Volta units.
Marissa Hunter, vice president of marketing in North America for Stellantis, said Volta’s weather-adapting technology gave the automaker’s creative team “some cool white space to develop the content.” Its digital agency, Huge, created the ads.
Hunter said the goal of the effort is to bring awareness to EV-inclined audiences at a time when their options have broadened. Jeep hopes the campaign reinforces its commitment to electrification, she said, while staying true to the brand’s reputation as the “go-anywhere, do-anything SUV brand.”
“We spent time really understanding the charging station technology and competitive advantages, and set the creative teams loose,” Hunter said in an emailed statement to Automotive News. “I think they came up with something as fun as the Jeep brand, as cool as ‘electrification’ and authentic to the values of authenticity, adventure and freedom.”
The Wrangler 4xe soon will be joined by a plug-in version of the redesigned Grand Cherokee, and the brand is forecasting that it will offer zero-emission 4xe variants in every SUV segment by 2025. For now, though, the Wrangler 4xe is getting the spotlight in California, the nation’s largest EV market.
The Volta chargers are located outside of stores such as Walgreens, Kohl’s and Amazon Fresh. The company has a network of more than 1,600 charging stations across the U.S.
The screens are being tasked with garnering attention from those charging up their vehicles and passersby drawn by the displays. Each station, on average, has seven charging sessions per day.
“We saw this as a new and innovative way for us to partner around one of their most important moments for the brand with the launch of this new electric vehicle,” Brandt Hastings, chief revenue officer for Volta, told Automotive News.
“[We] quickly realized that this became an ideal use case for this new capability to both showcase the launch of the new 4xe electric vehicle and then also to do it in a manner that is both dynamic, innovative and highly relevant.”