By Leow Ju-Len

THE GUESTS, IN their elegant eveningwear, sip free-flowing Moët and Chandon champagne while a live jazz combo performs in the corner. Parked in the middle of the mingling throng: a sleek private jet, the likes of which serve the air travel needs of only the biggest of bigwigs.

A gala soiree for millionaires letting it all hang out? Not quite. The seemingly lavish scene is, in fact, the local launch of the Mercedes-Benz CLS-Class.

More than ever, car distributors here are pulling out all the stops when it comes to new model launches. Once straightforward affairs that were held in hotel ballrooms or even just in showrooms, new car unveilings have entered a new age of elaborateness in order to ensure that the product in question enters the market with the biggest possible bang.

Last night saw the Citroën C4 and C5 unveiled at a private party held at the French ambassador’s residence, for instance, while Regent Motors is launching the new Ford Focus this weekend by closing off a section of road and setting up a special course to show off its precision handling.

“Marketers are challenging themselves to come up with bigger and better ideas,” explains Say Kwee Neng, managing director of Regent Motors, which handles the Ford brand here. “Once you’ve been to a car launch, you’ve been to them all, so it’s becoming harder and harder to attract customers to these events.”

Planned months in advance and executed with military precision (and often with a no-expenses-spared air to the proceedings), today’s car launches are a far cry from the yank-the-covers-off-and-start-the-music affairs of old. And the more creative the set-up, the better.

Mercedes-Benz’s glamorous, sporty CLS coupe, for example, was unveiled at a hangar in Seletar airbase. Call in the caterers, set up temporary air-conditioning, install the right lighting, book a suitably classy musical act, and you’ve got a unique launch venue. “We wanted something different from the normal hotel launches,” explains Wolfgang Huppenbauer, the managing director of DaimlerChrysler Southeast Asia’s Singapore operations. “The car is something which is elegant, which also offers a bit of adventure. The executives who are our target group, they probably also like some excitement.”

The presence of the private corporate jet, at a cost of US$7,000, undoubtedly set the right tone to the evening as well, helping to transform what was essentially a large shed into a suitably swanky joint.

“It’s an executive vehicle for people who have made it, to a certain extent,” says Mr Huppenbauer of the CLS. “The jet was the link to that type of lifestyle.” The would-be CLS customer, in other words, is the sort of high-flying client who might own a timeshare in a corporate jet.

The venue helped to ensure a good turnout, too - crucial for any launch. “The whole idea was to create a bit of suspense. It’s a bit of a surprise, being invited to an aircraft hangar,” says Mr Huppenbauer. 400 people had been invited, and 700 eventually turned up.

Last weekend’s launch of the Mitsubishi Evolution IX resulted in an equally pleasant headache for Cycle & Carriage. The cut-price supercar was showcased at a day-long event held at the former Kallang used car centre, with expectations for a crowd turnout of 1,500 people. Instead, an estimated 8,000 people showed up.

“In terms of raising brand awareness and building brand equity, it was a good activity,” says Dawn Pan, the regional marketing manager for Mitsubishi. “It got people talking.”

At the event, which took six weeks of frenzied planning, C&C’s marketing team played up the car’s heritage by inviting owners of previous-generation Evos to duke it out in a slalom course, flew in a Japanese rally ace to show off what the Evolution IX can do, and roped in a mega-dose of star power by inviting Jackie Chan, a long-time Mitsubishi ambassador, to grace the event.

That mix of high-octane activity and star power not only ensured the huge turnout, but helped to bring in the right sort of crowd. “We saw a lot of people driving competitors’ cars to our event. There were Maseratis and Porsches, too,” says Ms Pan. “We wanted to impress them with our brand, and you could see that they were truly driving enthusiasts. I’d say at least half of them came to see the rally action and the racing, and not just Jackie Chan.”

That the event was a victory in terms of turnout and brand-building is in little doubt, but every launch has but one golden mission to fulfil: to get people to buy the car. It’s an event’s ability to do precisely that which determines whether it’s a success or failure.

After all, good launches don’t come cheap. C&C splurged an estimated $350,000 on the Evolution IX bash, for instance. So was it ultimately worth the investment?

“For that weekend, we did get quite an increase in sales, but I’m not sure if it’s right to correlate the two,” says Ms Pan. C&C did not take orders for the Evolution IX at Kallang, but says the company’s showroom saw “significantly higher traffic flow”.

As for the Mercedes-Benz affair at Hangar 151, a DaimlerChrysler spokesperson says that the CLS has picked up “over 100″ bookings. Given that the car starts at $288,888 with COE for an entry-level CLS 350, that means sales of at least $29 million. That makes a six-figure price tag for a launch party seem like chump change.

Of course, it helps if you have the right product to launch in the first place. “A large part of it has to do with the car itself,” say Regent Motors ‘ Mr Say. “In the current market, it boils down to the product, the pricing, the equipment levels and so on.”

But planning a launch is all about what a distributor does with that product. “It’s about how the product is positioned in the mind’s eye of the public,” he adds. Getting it right can give a car all the positive associations it needs to take off successfully.

“Just putting the car in the showroom ain’t gonna do it.”