Is your legacy performance business due for a rebranding? See how this Honda-centric parts supplier expanded its offerings to other marques and attracted a new audience without alienating its traditional customer base.

THE PROBLEM: A 30-year-old performance parts business lost touch with younger customers.

THE SOLUTION: A comprehensive rebranding to meet the expectations of a new audience.

Motorsports and performance cars can be a tough bird. To some extent, they’re classic. Enduring. Unchanging. But on the other hand, everything evolves. What used to be cutting-edge cool eventually gets pushed to the fringes as “retro” or “old-school”—the warm, comfy blanket for a shrinking crowd of seasoned enthusiasts.

And that’s exactly what happened to sport-compact performance pioneers DC Sports, based in City of Industry, California. 

Founded in 1987, DC Sports was a force in the early sport-compact scene. With most of its enthusiasts geared toward Honda cars for the segment’s first decade or so, it made sense for DC’s entire product line to cater to that brand.

The company continued with its all-Honda focus as it was acquired by current owner, Pilot Automotive, in 2007. But over the years, the sport-compact scene had evolved considerably. Honda and Acura products were still a big part of it, but sport-compact enthusiasts were by this time eagerly embracing other car brands. By limiting itself to serving only Honda owners, DC found itself out of step with its audience. 

It was time to dig in and regain the edge that had made the company a leader in the sport-compact market’s formative years.

To begin the rebranding process, DC’s marketing team first established a baseline understanding of how the company was perceived. “When I came into the company at the end of 2018, I sat down with some of the team to figure out how we were going to position ourselves within the market,” said Danny Anguiano, brand manager at DC Sports. “We noticed that the older demographic, 35–40 years old and up, are huge diehards of the DC Sports brand. For them it’s a nostalgia thing. But a lot of those dudes now have families, and they can’t really be playing with their cars anymore.”

From that insight, a picture emerged for how the company should best approach the new audience it sought. “The new generation didn’t really know what DC was before,” explained Anguiano. “They don’t see us as a Honda brand moving into Nissans or a Honda brand moving into WRXs. They see us as something completely new. So it made more sense for us to come in and rebrand as almost a new entity to the market that didn’t know us before.”

The essential foundation of the rebranding was, of course, the parts that would be offered. The company sells only DC-branded components. So the first step had to be developing pieces for other auto brands, including Subaru, Nissan, Toyota, Kia, Lexus, and Genesis. 

Once DC had parts to offer a wider range of car owners, its next challenge was getting the right look. The marketing team overhauled the brand’s visual identity to better appeal to its younger target audience. For this phase of the process, the bigger resources and deeper pockets of parent company Pilot Automotive proved to be a vital asset. 

“We didn’t want to completely change the logo, but we did add some flavor to it,” recounted Anguiano. “We spent weeks going over different colors, different fonts, and how those correlate in the minds of different age groups. We were able to get quite a bit of data from different branding agencies that Pilot has done market research with. There were things that say what different colors represent to the human mind. For someone between 18 and 22, blue might mean one thing, but to a 25-year-old it could mean something different. I had never seen research like that.”

Next, it was time to get the message out. And for DC’s younger new target audience, social media was the obvious choice—Instagram, in particular. But at the same time, some of the best results have come from a more classic medium. “Email lets us provide people with clear and direct info without it getting diluted like on the Internet, or getting all the other people that are trying to put their opinion into somebody else’s decision.”

The company is also starting to experiment with paid online advertising, including ads on Instagram and Google. But Anguiano so far is taking a cautious approach. “We have to collect some data before I start pushing the needle too much and it backfires on me.”

In addition, DC has always relied heavily on live event appearances to maintain contact with its audience. The company participated in 70 events in 2019, and hopes to resume that pace once pandemic restrictions are eased.

Although Anguiano describes DC’s rebranding as “a work in progress,” the effort has already yielded impressive results—a 400% annual revenue increase compared to years prior to the project’s start in 2018, he said. At the same time, he also points to intangibles that bode well for the long-term health of the DC Sports brand. “Personally, when it comes to the rebranding side of it, I measure success through the engagement. Because at the end of the day, you’re only around because of your customers.”

SOURCES

–

DC Sports
dcsports.com