Rover 200 & 400 Owners Club

This full 90-second version of the HH/R launch advert (no pun intended) is from Rover Group's Marketing Department's video archive and has been digitised, enhanced by Jonathan Living and published on our club's YouTube channel and our Facebook page.

You can watch it here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FvxKSbqJ_k

I never did understand the HH/R launch advert. Rover had changed advertising agencies since the time of the R8 launch and it shows! It is still good to see it though.

Not as inspiring as the R8 one but nice to watch again. This reminds me of when I had to choose one as a company car

montegoman wrote: ↑Thu Apr 09, 2020 3:36 pm I never did understand the HH/R launch advert. Rover had changed advertising agencies since the time of the R8 launch and it shows! It is still good to see it though.

Well, I think laying claim to the best-in-class ride comfort based on a test by NASA just continued to reinforce Rover's traditional ride/comfort core values, didn't it? But I'd have gone with "it's better than the MK 1, and the MK 1 was better than pretty much anything else anyway, so... you know… buy one" type approach myself.

What is becoming apparent is that Rover's advertising was 1-for-1 between the TV and magazine adverts - I'm just working on neatening up the magazine advert that accompanied this TV ad as we speak. Different ad agencies, but still a very co-ordinated approach. You wonder who was making the decisions to advertise the cars in certain ways at certain times, and how on earth they ever made a decision about what to go for and whether there were any regrets/failures or conversely any notable successes/pickups in monthly sales for any particular one. When you get into it, it's surprising just how many different angles they used to pitch the cars during the 25 years of the 200 and 15 years of the 400. To name but a few - affordable luxury, performance, aspiration, value for money and sometimes just highlighting a traditional brand that was up-to-date in the modern era.

Put simply BMW didn't want HH/R competing with their own products and therefore they moved away from emphasising the high tech, good performance and handling to comfort, ride and "traditional" values of wood and leather. The ultimate incarnation of that was the "Relax it's a Rover" strap line. I can't imagine them using that in the era of the P6, SD1 or even the R8.

The voiceover says it has a long distance “world leading” figure of 2.06.

2.06 what? Not sure what this actually means!

montegoman wrote: ↑Sat Apr 11, 2020 5:54 am Put simply BMW didn't want HH/R competing with their own products and therefore they moved away from emphasising the high tech, good performance and handling to comfort, ride and "traditional" values of wood and leather. The ultimate incarnation of that was the "Relax it's a Rover" strap line. I can't imagine them using that in the era of the P6, SD1 or even the R8.

Thus sowing the seeds of the Clarkson disdain. Which in turn probably accounts for comparative low values to this day.

Paul_1978_yorks wrote: ↑Sat Apr 11, 2020 7:36 am The voiceover says it has a long distance “world leading” figure of 2.06.

2.06 what? Not sure what this actually means!

It is fairly obscure but is an application of some good science from NASA, see - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi ... aE_hxAGD_4

It is basically a single number to represent the vibration experience by a human and the lower the number, the better. I don't think it was used in other automotive applications but became big in Rover Cars in c.93/94 and led to the introduction of '1:1' damping on both HH/R and R3.

Regarding 'Relax - it's a Rover', this was being pushed hard in c.97 as the worldwide slogan but it did meet resistance in some markets. I was working in Japan at the time and Rover Japan really did not want to adopt the slogan at all as 'Relax' translates as 'Re-rax-u' which means 'put your feet up and have a beer'. Perhaps not what was intended...

Cheers John!

Hammond wrote: ↑Fri Apr 10, 2020 8:18 pm Not as inspiring as the R8 one but nice to watch again. This reminds me of when I had to choose one as a company car

Hello Steve. Would you be so kind to message me privately? I seem unable to private message you and I would like to talk about your previous 416 gti! Thank you Paul