The Auto Industry's Marketing Problem, Explained
Where Car Decisions Are Actually Being Made
The data on how the next generation of car buyers behaves should be on the wall of every automotive marketing department. Seventy-four percent of Gen Z use social media during their car shopping process. Sixty-one percent trust influencer recommendations and reviews. Half of Gen Z car buyers have already made a vehicle purchase online, and 65% are planning to buy their next car online. For context: this is not a niche behaviour. This is the direction of travel.
The platforms driving it are TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, in that order for discovery, with YouTube carrying the deeper research phase. TikTok delivers 90% greater ROI than traditional online video for automotive brands. Traditional automotive ad spend declined 2.1% in 2025 while digital spend grew 11.1% to $24.47 billion. The industry knows the shift is happening. The gap is in execution.
Automotive is one of the strongest-performing verticals on TikTok. The challenge for brands isn’t finding the audience, it’s showing up in a way that the audience actually respects.
What the Smart Brands Are Doing
BMW has been one of the more interesting case studies in automotive social strategy. Rather than defaulting to petrolhead creators and horsepower specs, the brand has deliberately pulled in lifestyle and fashion creators, comedians, and trend-led voices, bringing the car into cultural contexts that wouldn’t have appeared in a traditional media plan. The result is content that reaches audiences who weren’t actively in the market but come away with a positive brand impression that shapes future consideration. It’s brand building through cultural proximity rather than product-led broadcast.
Bentley has leaned into high-end cultural moments in a way that suits the brand’s positioning, including a partnership with “Tube Girl,” the creator whose viral commuting content became a global phenomenon. The logic is sound: aspirational brands benefit from association with aspirational cultural moments, and the creator provided the authenticity that a Bentley-produced campaign simply couldn’t.
The Authenticity Gap
The automotive brands struggling most right now share a common pattern. They’re still producing content that feels like advertising, polished, controlled, product-led, and posting it into social feeds where the surrounding content is personal, specific, and human. The contrast is jarring, and audiences respond accordingly.
Car buyers today are entering the purchase process with opinions already formed. They’ve watched the reviews, seen owner communities discussing the quirks, and followed creators who drove it for a week and gave an honest verdict. By the time they walk into a dealership, if they walk into one at all, the brand impression has largely been set by people who aren’t on the payroll.
Owner communities are one of the most powerful and underused assets in automotive marketing. User-generated content from genuine owners, amplified through paid distribution, consistently outperforms brand-produced creative. The car enthusiast community on social is self-organising and passionate, brands that celebrate and platform that community rather than try to control the narrative are building something that scales in a way no media buy can replicate.
The Influencer Question
Automotive is a category where the influencer selection question matters enormously. The wrong partnership, a creator whose audience doesn’t align, a collaboration that feels transactional, a brief that strips out the creator’s voice, will underperform and can actively damage brand perception with an audience that prides itself on spotting inauthenticity.
The brands getting this right in 2026 are thinking in two tracks. The first is the enthusiast tier, automotive-specific creators with deep credibility in car communities, whose audiences are already in the consideration mindset. These partnerships drive direct commercial intent. The second is the cultural tier, lifestyle, fashion, comedy, and culture creators who bring the car into a context outside the category and build brand equity with audiences who aren’t yet in the market but will be.
Both tracks matter. The mistake most brands make is running only one of them, or treating influencer marketing as a single campaign lever rather than an ongoing, always-on part of how the brand maintains presence.
Final Thoughts
The automotive industry’s marketing challenge in 2026 isn’t really about the product. The cars, broadly, are better than they’ve ever been. The challenge is closing the gap between what the product is and what the audience knows and feels about it, through channels they actually use, with voices they actually trust.
The brands building that presence now, consistently, specifically, with genuine cultural understanding, are the ones that will be winning consideration when the next generation of buyers makes their decisions. That window is open. But it won’t be open forever.
Automotive is one of our core verticals. If you’re thinking about your brand’s social and creator strategy, we’d love to talk. Get in touch.