Maximum horsepower: How Rivian makes the most of its content

Rivian bills itself as making electric adventure vehicles, environmentally friendly cars and trucks for those who like the outdoors. Their fleet of vehicles are steeped in high-end design, with unique design-led features like their headlights standing out dramatically on the street. The brand has developed a distinct look and feel that fits its image, with hues of yellows, greens and browns and natural photography and film.

The Rivian brand identity is well defined and extends across all of its content. This ensures that as they distribute across their ecosystem, all the content feels consistent and on brand. Distribution is key to the Rivian content strategy, the brand content is well produced and as a result it’s important that it is leveraged in as many ways as possible to maximize its ROI (return on investment).

Much of the Rivian storytelling originates with editorial and merchandising content on the brand’s Stories section of its website. Articles with headlines such as ‘Electrifying the TransAmerica Trail’ and ‘The Long Weekend: Wyoming’ feature in-depth writing and stunning photography. This content is then repurposed and reused across the Rivian ecosystem, with imagery and videos shared on its social channels. Through its natural approach to its brand photography Rivian ensures that visual elements are a perfect fit for the likes of instagram.

Long form editorial and merchandising articles are featured on the Rivian website.

When it comes to video Rivian takes the same approach and makes its high quality output work hard for the brand. Films shot with a documentary style are a time and financial investment for a brand, so ensuring they can be repurposed is key to delivering a return. Rivian’s films are repurposed into content that can be used across all their channels from social to CRM. The key here is their editorial and merchandising approach, it ensures there is value in the content for a wide variety of audiences.

Films are recut to fit the format of the social channels they are being distributed on, but the natural approach to film-making makes the content an easy fit for social distribution. Long form versions are distributed both on their own platform and Youtube.

It’s also important to note how Rivian brings its own audience into its content distribution strategy. If you browse the brand’s instagram you’ll see a mix of brand created and user-generated content (UGC). It’s a substantially higher proportion of UGC than you would see on similar brands.

It’s possible because the brand’s approach to photography is similar to the way UGC is captured and is a world away from the staged photography of their competitors - where a similar mix would stand out as jarring. Rivian often curates its audience's’ content around a certain topic or caption, which enables them to bring their users into their storytelling around a wide variety of topics.

THE TAKEAWAY

• Create a simple brand look and feel that can easily extend across all channels.

• Make the most of every piece of of storytelling by reusing and redistributing where relevant.

• Involve your audience in the content creation and distribution process.

• Create formats that can be easily replicated and distributed.

GO DEEPER

Explore Rivian Stories here.