What to Listen to On Your Next Road trip
Reese’s book club adds book love to Buicks:
Hello Sunshine takes on the Buick in-car experience
Photo: Instagram/Reese Witherspoon
The opening credits to the 2017 HBO series Big Little Lies hooked me. The show, based off Liane Moriarty’s novel, stars Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, and Zoe Kravitz. In the 90 second sequence, the aching song “Cold Little Heart” by Michael Kiwanuka plays as the camera lingers on the Bixby Bridge in Big Sur, and the stunning coastal roads to north along the Monterey Peninsula.
In this setting, each woman is in the driver’s seat, schlepping her kids to school, and totally in charge. The whoosh of the waves crash and the ocean blurs in the window, both dreamy and foreboding. I can almost taste the briny morning sea breeze from that segment, cutting through the early morning fog.
Witherspoon’s character Madeline Mackenzie is shown first in her SUV, with a quick image of the dash on the screen. She has the most subsequent scenes in and around her car, which is revealed as the Buick Enclave. It’s a choice pick for her on-top-of-it-all character, who is a familiar character from every PTA board. The Enclave is a sleeper SUV that’s calming, comfy, and low key luxe. Those Buick moments turned out to be well-played product placement, and the beginning of a larger connective tissue between Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine media company — which produced the series— and General Motor’s Buick brand.
Buick announced last year Hello Sunshine’s app Reese’s Book Club would be in Buick products last fall. The app integration first rolled out in the Encore GX in late 2020, and is now available across the Buick line. This spring, I got into a 2021 Buick Envision, a svelte and cozy crossover. The book club app was part of the standard in-car apps included on the $45,000 Envision Avenir model I drove.
“All of the women involved on this project had similar pain points and similar needs when it came to their vehicles.”
When I drive alone, I’m always listening to something – music, books, or podcasts. Far too often, I’m in a rush and I don’t take the time to plan out my streaming situation in advance. The app is designed to make that easy. The club selections weren’t all on my radar, which is the best kind of curated experience. For my tween, we came across the book “The Fire Keeper’s Daughter” by Angeline Boulley and podcasts, like “My Best Breakup,” which reminded me of The New York Times Modern Love column. The content was personal, and best yet, easy to find. There’s just enough to choose from, without the distraction of too many options. Far too often when I pull up Spotify in the car, I find I have to pull over to get what I want, or I end up with that uneasy distracted driving feeling.
Photo: General Motors
“We worked hard to make the program holistically stood behind those values of reaching a female narrative, from the user experience to the marketing to the female engineering team, said Mallory Woodrow, an advertising manager for Buick. The app backstory went far beyond an ad agency meeting.
Buick engineer Daphne Zargar and Global Manager for In-Vehicle Apps formed an all-female engineering and UX team to work with Hello Sunshine. Together they translated the user experience of the smartphone experience into the vehicle. “All of the women involved on this project had similar pain points and similar needs when it came to their vehicles,” Woodrow said. “We wanted ease of use. We wanted the graphics to translate really well.”
No doubt the audience that follows Witherspoon’s expansive reach is lucrative to Buick in its efforts to appeal to women in different life stages. It helps when Reese posts about it in her fans.
Witherspoon was recently named the face of Biossance clean beauty brand. Reese’s Book Club has great optics – including a social following of over two million followers on Instagram, and 38 books that have gone on to be New York Times best seller. The production studio has high visibility with a steady run of programming in film and TV, all adjacent to its Oscar-winning founder. One of its latest film projects is the film Where the Crawdads Sing, a 2018 book club pick (also available on the app.)
Buick says there’s more to come in its growing app business, and for its Hello Sunshine collaboration. “We want to get in front of audiences in terms of programming and we also wanted to get in front of audiences in the vehicle, which is how Reese’s Book Club came to be in Buick,” Morrow says. “It really aligns with where we’re going and what we want people to know we stand for.”