Reaching new demographics: Muscle Car UK
Taking a British enthusiast brand to an audience that had never been spoken to directly — without losing the people already there.
Muscle Car UK had a devoted audience and a narrow one: men who already knew what they were looking at. Everything the brand published assumed that knowledge — model codes in headlines, no explanation of why any of it mattered. Growth had flattened, and the obvious read was that the market was full. It wasn’t; the door was just hard to find.
I started with the comments and the inbox rather than a persona workshop. Two groups kept appearing who nobody was writing for: people who had inherited a car and were suddenly responsible for it, and people who liked the culture — the design, the sound, the era — without owning anything. Both were being quietly filtered out by the shorthand.
The strategy was not to make the brand more beginner-friendly, which would have annoyed the existing audience for nothing. It was to add entry points beside the existing content. Explainers written as stories rather than glossaries. Ownership pieces about cost, storage and paperwork — the questions people are embarrassed to ask in a forum. And a photography-led strand that treats these cars as objects, which needs no prior knowledge to enjoy.
Channel choices followed the audience rather than the brand’s habits. The enthusiast core lives in long-form and email, so that stayed exactly as it was. The new audiences were found in short vertical video and in interest-led search, so those got their own formats, their own captions and their own tone — the same voice, fewer assumptions.
I measured it on two axes on purpose: whether the new work brought in people who had never engaged before, and whether the existing audience’s engagement moved at all. The second number mattered as much as the first, because the failure mode of a repositioning like this is winning strangers and losing regulars.
What I would keep: reading the inbox before writing the strategy. What I would change: I underestimated how much editorial guidance the new strands needed — the tone held only once the rules for it were written down rather than demonstrated.