With NX Campaign, Lexus Shows Off New Car Aiming At Youth, Diversity

Lexus is trying to standardize its products while variegating its marketing. The new 2022 NX subcompact crossover is the brand’s first nameplate for demonstrating much of that two-pronged strategy.

In a just-launched ad campaign for the new NX, Lexus is extending perhaps its broadest reach yet to young and diverse potential customers, with two mainstream commercials that feature the same woman of color and a slew of new advertisements that specifically target BIPOC audiences — including one aimed especially at Asian Indian and East Asian viewers.

“We’re trying to reach the next-generation luxury buyer — call them ‘creative visionaries,’” Vinay Shahani, vice president of Lexus marketing, told me. “They’re younger, more affluent, and more technologically adept” than traditional Lexus buyers. “These are people who are ambitious and driven to succeed and want to pave their own way.”

The vehicle for this youth-oriented and ethnically fractionated approach to marketing is NX, which Lexus is describing as “all-new” because the existing model was re-engineered from the ground up.

“It’s got a new body, new platform, new interior,” Shahani said. The new NX also offers the first plug-in-hybrid model in the Lexus lineup. And significantly, he added, NX is one of the first manifestations of a standardization of the driving experience within the brand that has been masterminded by Koji Sato, president of Lexus International, who previously was the chief engineer.

“Years ago, you could characterize Lexus as the type of organization that empowered each chief engineer [of a vehicle] to develop its own driving dynamics,” Shahani explained. But lately, Sato “has tried to impose a consistent driving-dynamics standard— for cornering, how the suspension should be tuned, and the performance of each powertrain. That’s giving us a much more dynamic feel and gives drivers confidence, and it helps that [NX] is an all-new platform.”

NX also marks the debut of a major feature improvement for Lexus: an available 14-inch touchscreen that has been completely redesigned for user-friendliness. “It’s very natural to use, and voice-activated, and it represents a big advancement relative to where we were from an infotainment perspective,” Shahani said. The U.S.-based technology team that developed the new screen did such a good job of it, he said, that it has taken over such duties globally for Lexus.

Two main spots in the advertising campaign underscore Shahani’s approach to the potential audience for NX. One spot, “Hustle,” depicts a woman of color who seems to be the interviewee in a hiring situation, listening to the man across the desk bloviate about how to succeed in business. But in a twist, she rises at the end to tell the male — who, it turns out, is the job candidate — that they’ll be in touch. Then she goes out and gets into her NX.

Teh spot “takes on the traditional rules for getting ahead,” Shahani said. “The target customer is ambitious and going to prioritize what is important for them, and NX can cater to their individual needs and emotional desires.”

“Get Ahead,” the other spot, features the same woman, and also a man of color, who demonstrate through their use of NX some of the new features. For example, a “safe-exit” warning prevents the woman from opening the driver’s door of her parked NX into a bicyclist who was oncoming into her blind spot.

“That feature definitely is a brand first, and I don’t know of any other carmaker that has that,” Shahani said of the safe-exit feature.

Separate ads are aimed at Black, Hispanic, LGBTQ, and Asian Indian and East Indian cultures. Overall, the creative campaign shows “new ways of having the brand appeal to a group of people that may not have considered Lexus in the past,” he said. “From a conquest perspective, it’s a good opportunity to introduce more people to the brand.”