What it takes to build awareness on social media for a new automotive brand in the UK

 The UK automotive market is being rewritten. But as more manufacturers enter the market, the challenge isn’t simply getting products in front of people. It’s knowing how to build awareness on social media in a way that creates familiarity, credibility and trust.

According to recent Carwow research, 49% of UK drivers surveyed would consider a Chinese brand for their next car, compared with 24% in H1 2023. In the first half of 2026, Chinese brands accounted for around 15% of UK new-car registrations. 

 But greater acceptance has also created greater competition. For new automotive brands entering the UK, a strong product is no longer enough. They need to build recognition, establish credibility and earn a place alongside manufacturers people have known for decades. 

 That was the challenge facing JAECOO when we began working together. 

 Three lessons for challenger brands looking to build awareness on social:

1. Consistency builds familiarity

Our partnership began with a clear remit: build JAECOO’s UK social presence from the ground up. 

Through our social, creative and Content Studio teams, we built the always-on content engine needed to introduce the brand to UK audiences. 

That meant defining how JAECOO should behave on social, establishing storytelling pillars, creating and publishing content, managing communities, responding to cultural moments and using paid social to put the right work in front of the right audiences. 

For a challenger brand, social isn’t simply another distribution channel. It is where people can first encounter the brand, investigate it and begin forming an opinion. 

 If brands want to build awareness on social media, consistency matters. Not just in frequency, but in message, tone and storytelling.

2. Product features become more powerful when they become stories

 Effective social shouldn’t be a conveyor belt of posts. 

Alongside BAU, we developed social-first creative projects that demonstrated what the cars could do while creating attention around events, launches and partnerships. 

We brought together strategists, creatives, designers and social content specialists to take briefs from concept through creative development and production to activation, distribution and optimisation. 

JAECOO SESSIONS was one example.

Built around JAECOO’s vehicle-to-load capability, the campaign turned a technical product feature into a four-month social-first content series, showing how the car could power experiences as well as journeys. 

The concept centred on one simple challenge: one JAECOO Vehicle-to-Load (V2L) cable, five creators.  

Working across food, music, adventure, gaming and rugby, each creator used the vehicle’s power in their own world, creating five distinct stories anchored by one product truth. 

Each collaboration became a content set: a hero film, image carousel, creator-owned content and value-add formats that extended the story, using the creator’s expertise to give audiences something useful or entertaining in its own right. 

Rather than relying on a single hero asset, the approach gave each theme multiple ways to work across social and helped the series generate more than 3 million views. 

  The overarching lesson here was that awareness isn’t built by talking about product features alone. It’s built by helping people understand what those features mean in real life.

3. Awareness becomes momentum when channels work together

  As JAECOO grew, so did our relationship. 

 What started with social expanded into selected opportunities across OOH, TVC, campaigns and wider brand storytelling. 

We worked alongside JAECOO’s internal team and wider agency roster, bringing our strengths in social, creative and content into a much bigger marketing ecosystem.  

 Sometimes we led. Sometimes we supported. Sometimes we translated a wider campaign into social. Sometimes we were the lead creative agency. 

That collaboration was important. Modern brands rarely have one partner doing everything. What matters is whether those partners can work together and connect thinking across channels. 

  Social media may have been our starting point, but building awareness for a new brand rarely happens through a single channel. Consistent activity across touchpoints helps transform awareness into familiarity and familiarity into trust.

From awareness to momentum 

JAECOO’s wider trajectory in the UK has been remarkable. The JAECOO 7 ranked as the UK’s third most-registered model in the first eight months of 2026. 

That commercial performance belongs to a much bigger collective effort across JAECOO’s UK team, dealer network, product and pricing strategy, media investment and multiple marketing partners. 

Our contribution had a more specific job: help turn an unfamiliar name into a familiar one on social.

 From January 2025 to April 2026, we supported JAECOO’s social and creative activity across the UK, contributing to 745 social assets, 310m+ impressions, 260k+ engagements and 162m+ video views, while JAECOO’s social audience grew by 86k+ followers. 

Behind those numbers was a consistent approach: building real-world creative narratives around the cars, working with creators and communities, and finding culturally relevant ways for the brand to connect with audiences. 

What challenger brands can take from our experience?

JAECOO may be an automotive success story, but the challenge isn’t unique to the industry. 

Whether entering a crowded category, launching into a new market or shifting perceptions of an established business, brands need an engine capable of doing two things at once: Show up consistently. And know when to show up bigger. 

Our organic social teams build that everyday presence. Paid social gives strong creative greater precision, reach and performance. And our Creative & Content Studio brings together strategy, ideas, design, production and specialist talent to turn bigger opportunities into work built to travel. 

Through our ONE PHA model, those specialisms connect rather than operate as separate services. 

Because brand momentum isn’t built by always-on or big creative moments alone. It comes from the relationship between them: everyday activity builds familiarity and audience understanding; that intelligence informs what comes next; and bigger ideas create new reasons to pay attention. 

That’s the model we built with JAECOO. And it’s the model we can bring to the next challenger brand ready to make its name known.

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