Hot Wheels Guerrilla Marketing
Business cards get thrown away and forgotten. How many flyers and emails do you forget about or throw right away as well? If you’re a gear head and you receive a custom Hot Wheels in the mail - chances are you probably won’t just throw that away. This is the idea behind my 2023 marketing push.
The work I do is fairly specialized so targeting specific companies or folks I think would make good partners for work makes sense. The time invested in each box a potential client gets is fairly high while costs are fairly low on a per box price. We decided to make about 30 custom cars being as that is the hardest part of this project. We did 3 different vehicles with a couple different color combos across 2 of the vehicles. To start, each was sandblasted to remove original coatings, decals, and some imperfections.
I measure the bodies of the cars and recreate the panels in Photoshop at scale so I can translate in screen graphics for actual 1/64th scale vehicles. The decals are printed in-house on inkjet waterslide paper. The same type of decal that model kits come with made at home so they are extremely fragile - hence some minor imperfections in various decal applications. At this small a scale its difficult to see and you could spend hours on each car to make them perfect. Not what we’re after.
Cars are primed and painted in color combos that that work for my brand - monochromatic plus red usually has always stuck out as a favorite of mine. My motorcycles are the same color combo ironically.
Once bodies are painted they are ready for decal application. Decals to represent lights and graphics on the vehicles as if they were a real branded vehicle (not that I haven’t considered it).
Final touches are to clear lacquer the whole body of the car to ensure the decals are protected.
I thought about the idea of a box as a gift to a potential client which housed various marketing materials with the scale vehicle front and center. Ultimately the box came together really well I think, and I’m hoping clients I send this to will appreciate the hand-touch that went into each of these kits.