At Grupo Castrosua, we have maintained constant activity in this area. Over the years, we have launched specific campaigns, both corporate and product-related (i.e., linked to specific launches), in addition to, logically, maintaining constant informational activity especially directed at the industry media.
Through our advertising campaigns, we have also sought to highlight different aspects related to our corporate social responsibility policies, for example, by showcasing our interest in promoting sports related to the sea, specifically sailing. We were pioneers in the “Solitario y a dos” regattas in Galicia. In fact, we sponsored this discipline for years, which brought together the best national sailboats, and with the recognition of the Galician Sailing Federation, this regatta achieved great prestige and became a scoring event for national circuits; and everything that sport evokes is an inspiration for our campaigns due to shared values.
Through this post, we want to focus especially on detailing the singularities of the different campaigns that Grupo Castrosua has launched in the current millennium and show you how our advertising strategy has evolved. In this first installment, we will focus on showing you the campaigns that the Carsa brand developed between 1999 and 2008. CARSA began its journey as a company of the CASTROSUA Group and started with the mass production of urban buses with Scania chassis.
Precisely, until 2008, Castrosua and Carsa – two of the main companies that make up our group – carried out separate actions in terms of advertising strategy.
The first of the advertisements we analyze in this post dates back to 1999. In it, we see how the emphasis was placed through creativity that highlighted Carsa’s production capacity from a perspective where attributes such as specialization, design, warranty, reliability, or modularity were to be highlighted.
At the beginning of the millennium, in 2000, Carsa opted to replicate the wordplay “en serie/en serio” (in series/seriously) in its advertisement, which it had already proposed the previous year, to emphasize the intense and rigorous production of bodies in its facilities based on the same quality parameters already recognized by the market through Castrosua. It did so with simple creativity that showed an image of the lower left front of a yellow bus.
In the following two-year period, 2001-2002, Carsa associated its brand with sailing, a discipline to which our group, as we have mentioned, has been intimately linked. With the slogan *Sailing towards the future*, which continued to incorporate the tagline “seriously,” sailboats were the absolute focus of the image, completed at the bottom with a photo of a bus.
The claim *Seriously manufacturing bodies* continued to be the focus of Carsa’s advertising strategy between 2002 and 2003, this time with much more sophisticated graphics that particularly highlighted the company’s naming.
Without abandoning the previous slogan, although placing it in the background, Carsa’s campaign in the 2004-2005 biennium promoted a more developed idea as its main focus under the claim *Imagine the future*, moving away from the usual parameters of bodywork images as the centerpiece of the campaign, which was unusual in those years.
The next campaign, *We are young, but our roots are deep*, was the slogan chosen for the following campaign, which highlighted that despite Carsa as such being created in the mid-90s, we already had prior experience in bodying buses in that location. In this post, you can recall our history. This campaign also continued to incorporate, albeit smaller, the iconic phrase *Seriously manufacturing bodies*.
In 2008, the last year Carsa pursued an individualized advertising strategy before sharing it with Castrosua from 2009 onwards, the main slogan from the previous biennium was maintained, as we can see in the image. However, this time, the slogan that had characterized all of Carsa’s previous campaigns and played on the words “serie” and “serio” was omitted.
These last two campaigns were based on photos taken by Eduardo J. Castro Rodríguez, who accompanied the companies’ advertising for years.
What do you think of the different campaigns launched by Carsa in the first decade of this century? Which one do you remember most fondly? Tell us your impressions and, above all, stay tuned to our blog for the next installment of this story about our advertising evolution!
