The Kar­dashi­ans, the Hiltons and the like might be notable excep­tions, but the aver­age young con­sumer is prob­a­bly not the first to come to mind as the ide­al tar­get for a lux­u­ry car brand. Ger­man auto man­u­fac­tur­er Mer­cedes-Benz, how­ev­er, has sev­er­al new mod­els that it says come at low­er price points and it is using Insta­gram to make sure mil­len­ni­als not only know about these cars, but are able to inter­act with them on a plat­form that is native to them.

Mer­cedes-Benz USA says it is tak­ing vehi­cle cus­tomiza­tion “one step fur­ther” by bring­ing the expe­ri­ence to Insta­gram via the han­dle @GLA_Build_Your_Own, which uses “the native func­tion­al­i­ty of Insta­gram to allow users to build their own ver­sion of [its] all-new lux­u­ry com­pact SUV with a few sim­ple taps in the app.”

To design one of these SUVs, Mer­cedes’ new GLA mod­el, Insta­gram users search for the user @GLA_Build_Your_Own and tap the image to start. From there, they tap more to choose col­or, wheels, roof and grille. Final­ly, an image of the cus­tomized vehi­cle appears along with the SUV’s MSRP and a mes­sage that says, “Take this pic to your local Mer­cedes-Benz deal­er to get start­ed.”

A YouTube video pro­vides a fur­ther demon­stra­tion.

In order to build the expe­ri­ence, the brand cre­at­ed “hun­dreds of Insta­gram accounts, uploaded more than a thou­sand images and uti­lized the platform’s tag­ging func­tion­al­i­ty” in order to tar­get a “dig­i­tal­ly savvy con­stituen­cy” of “mobile-first con­sumers.”

Mer­cedes’ GLA mod­el launched in Sep­tem­ber and the @GLA_Build_Your_Own cam­paign fol­lows what Mer­cedes calls “the suc­cess of” its #GLApacked Insta­gram cam­paign in which the brand asked “lead­ing cre­ators and influ­encers to imag­ine how they would fill” the GLA “using the foot­print of the GLA’s car­go space.” Per Insta­gram, the #GLApacked hash­tag is asso­ci­at­ed with 280 images.

Accord­ing to Mark Aik­man, depart­ment man­ag­er of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and CRM for Mer­cedes-Benz USA, that “suc­cess” refers in part to the influ­encers who helped Mer­cedes flesh out the cam­paign, includ­ing pro golfer Rick­ie Fowler, who helped the brand reach “a tremen­dous num­ber of peo­ple through their own chan­nels.” (For his part, Fowler has 395,000 fol­low­ers on Insta­gram.)

That also includes Insta­gram user @thiswildidea, who took a road trip to Ver­mont in a GLA and took a pho­to of his dog stand­ing on his feet while he did a hand­stand out of the sun­roof. Aik­man said this image went viral. (It has about 62,000 likes on Insta­gram.)

“That would be one of the big suc­cess­es we saw – peo­ple learn­ing about the car and talk­ing about the car,” Aik­man said.

Fur­ther, Aik­man said Insta­gram has been “a real­ly impor­tant chan­nel” in launch­ing both Mer­cedes’ CLA and GLA mod­els. The brand ran pre­vi­ous­ly ran a cam­paign for the CLA in which it asked five Insta­gram pho­tog­ra­phers to take a road trip in a CLA and take inspir­ing pho­tos. The pho­tog­ra­ph­er that gen­er­at­ed the most Insta­gram likes got to keep the CLA for good.

Accord­ing to dig­i­tal agency Emerge Inter­ac­tive, which col­lab­o­rat­ed with dig­i­tal agency Razor­fish on the CLA ini­tia­tive, this cam­paign gen­er­at­ed more than 2 mil­lion likes on Insta­gram.

“As we devel­oped #GLAPacked, we tried to think about Insta­gram influ­encers and the tar­get for the GLA and what they want to bring on the week­end and came up with the idea of cap­i­tal­iz­ing on a native Insta­gram behav­ior of orga­niz­ing things and tak­ing pic­tures, but this time on the car­go mat of the GLA,” Aik­man said. “We had the idea with our agency Razor­fish to say, ‘How do we real­ly talk about cus­tomers think­ing about their own GLA with­in Insta­gram with­out hav­ing the abil­i­ty to link out, [so we decid­ed to] build our own [cus­tomiza­tion tool] inside Insta­gram, which is the first time any auto brand has done any­thing like this.”

Aik­man calls the GLA “one of [Mer­cedes’] entry lev­el mod­els” and said its start­ing MSRP of $33,000 is “a gate­way to our SUVs.”

“We think the design lan­guage and price point is real­ly appeal­ing,” he added.

Experts say the @GLA_Build_Your_Own effort could very well be the first inter­ac­tive Insta­gram cam­paign, but note cus­tomiza­tion is noth­ing new in the car indus­try and beyond, includ­ing brands like Nike, which offers a build-your-own-shoe plat­form.

Dig­i­tal strate­gist Augus­tine Fou is a bit skep­ti­cal, not­ing, “There is a mis­match between the tar­get audi­ence who would want to do that on a smart­phone or tablet and the audi­ence that can afford a $33,000 car.”

But, at the same time, Fou said @GLA_Build_Your_Own is a “nice exper­i­ment.”

Mer­cedes worked with Razor­fish on the lat­est GLA cam­paign.

What do you think about Mer­cedes’ efforts to go after a younger audi­ence?