Creating a space for customer-centricity
This work was focussed around a single problem. People buy their first Volkswagen, but when it’s time for their next car, they buy something else.
The brief from the CMO at Volkswagen was focussed around a single problem. People buy their first Volkswagen, but when it’s time for their next car, they buy something else. The reason is that the brand experience of owning a Volkswagen doesn’t live up to the experience of buying one. The car itself might be great, but there are lots of great cars. When the interactions with the brand are underwhelming from the moment you leave a dealership, there’s nothing more to keep you there, and a shiny BMW looks just as appealing as a shiny Volkswagen.
Working closely with the marketing team and CMO at Volkswagen of America, I led a small team to come up with a creative platform that would lead a cultural shift across the organisation as well as set the foundation for the dealer marketing country wide.
Starting with an intense one week design sprint, we worked through the problem, the creative objectives and set about coming up with ideas. After some ruthless dot voting and refinement, The Board of Customer Obsession was born.
The BOCO campaign has had a far greater impact than even the CMO had hoped for, and has become a reference for how to drive employee engagement and customer centricity across the entire VWG of America stable of brands.
A Vehicle for Engagement
The creative approach was underpinned by a framework that set out our strategy for changing behaviour among VW employees, dealers and partners. We recognised early on that the only way this campaign would have the desired effect was if it had an authenticity and unexpected tone to cut through the usual, easy to ignore corporate comms that people are used to seeing.
It had to not only deliver a message, but incentivise real changes in behaviour. The creative was supported by initiatives such as ‘Obsesstival’ a company wide innovation and customer centricity event, as well as changes to incentives that would reward and encourage the behaviours that would start to build this new culture for the brand.
Impact
The BOCA campaign excelled in our key initial metric of engagement, with an enthusiastic reception not seen with similar efforts in the past. Changing culture is a work of years not months, but the initial response and observable changes have been overwhelmingly positive, not only in driving change with customer facing employees but a greater understanding across the organisation that message, behaviour and incentivisation all have a role to play in getting the brand where it needs to go.
