The all-female marketing team at online car marketplace heycar have celebrated the company’s first birthday with its biggest market activity to date – aiming to bust myths about female drivers.

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the startup has managed to thrive. Since launching in 2019, heycar now has more than 150,000 cars listed on its UK site, which has been visited more than 20 million times. heycar has also contributed to the impressive performance of the automotive sector over the past year by driving £40 million per month to its network of 3,700 dealerships.

Led by marketing director Tracey Woods, the heycar marketing team is also comprised of marketing lead Katie Wilson, brand lead Olivia Jackson and marketing executive Claudia Kampmann. Together, they represent heycar’s brand, which aims to defy outdated stereotypes of a male dominated automotive sector while emphasising the strong, positive and emotional aspects of buying a car.

Woods, who has a strong background in automotive and start-up tech brand building, commented: “The car industry has many stereotypes and can be set in its ways at times, the way things are done is the way they’ve always been done. From the outset, we were keen to set ourselves apart by challenging this wherever we could, to present a different and positive image.”

The heycar team have been committed to growing the brand throughout the pandemic and have now released their new creative campaign, which was devised and shot in lockdown.

The new campaign complements the heycar brand by leaving behind negative stereotypes from the industry and instead focusing on the positive and emotional aspects of buying a new car. With the help of creative agency Atomic, the campaign tagline ‘Hey, buying a car never felt so good’ was created.

Woods said: “Buying a car should be really exciting, but for most it’s inconvenient and fraught with worry. We’ve been hard at work this year building out our proposition to answer some of the biggest challenges faced by buyers, helping them to simply enjoy the ride,.

“Our campaign brings this to life, focussing on just how good it can feel to buy a car through heycar, and showcasing the strongest reasons for customers to believe – including our new money back guarantee offering.”

As part of the campaign, heycar invested millions into a new TV ad creative which was backed by over £5.5million of media investment across TV, video on demand channels, radio, Spotify, sponsorship, You Tube and social media. The ad was directed by multi award-winning comedy director James Rouse whose famous work includes spots for Marmite and Harvey Nichols.

In its first week of TV spots and launch on social media, the brand has seen an uplift of 196%, while traffic uplift to the heycar site that is directly attributed to the campaign is at 44%.

Woods added: “The significant investment we have put into this campaign in challenging times shows our commitment to creating a truly meaningful and nationally recognised brand – and we couldn’t think of a better way to mark our first anniversary.”