THE celebrity-studded launch of the new Halewood-built Range Rover Evoque has made the car an online hit months before it hits car showrooms, the company says.

The car was launched at London’s Kensington Palace last week at a glitzy event that saw Victoria Beckham named as Range Rover’s new “creative design executive”.

JLR’s decision to build the new vehicle at Halewood will lead to the creation of 1,000 new jobs at the plant, which now employs 1,900 people, and has secured the site’s long-term future.

The company says the car is the smallest and “greenest” 4x4 it has yet built, and hopes it will prove popular with drivers who might not previously have considered a Range Rover.

The company used social media outlets and online marketing tools to promote the launch night and is now seeing the success of its strategy.

JLR says the video of the launch party that it posted online – and which was also shown on the Daily Post website – has been watched 1.8m times.

The launch event, hosted by DJ George Lamb, was also streamed live online.

On Twitter, “Range Rover” was one of the top ten most tweeted terms in Britain on the night of the launch and, during this period, around 6,400 wall posts, comments, or “likes” were added to the Land Rover Facebook page. Meanwhile, Google returned over 400 articles from established news networks – including the Daily Post – and from more than 7,000 blogs.