A sacrifice worth making
Posted by Richard Pentin on February 11, 2010
If you’ve ever read Adam Morgan’s “Eating the Big Fish” you’ll be familiar with the credo of making certain sacrifices in order to do great things in other areas. Theoretically speaking, to get noticed as a challenger brand it’s important to work out what you’re not going to do and then redirect that money, energy and resource into something you do want to do.
So in practical terms this could mean sacrificing a particular media channel, a market region, a customer segment, or even a product within your portfolio. This will enable brands with more limited budgets to ‘over commit’ elsewhere.
As you may have heard, VW did exactly this when they came to launch the new 2010 GTi. Instead of investing in traditional paid-for media such as print ads, digital banners or OOH they put all their eggs in one basket and produced an iphone app. And that’s it!
If you’re not familiar with this unusual launch, check out this video posted on AKQA’s Facebook page as it explains the case study in full.
Calculating the true efficacy of social media
The other thing worth mentioning about this campaign is that if anyone wanted actual proof on the potential efficacy of social media, this is it! By sacrificing all other paid-for media in favour of this app, they’ve effectively created a controlled environment where the true ROI of this activity can be measured without being skewed by other campaign initiatives.
Now that doesn’t happen very often…
Brave digital marketing from VW « dave does digital said
[...] to put their entire marketing budget into an Iphone app as VW did for the launch of their 2010 GTi? Read about it here, and if you can bear the voiceover, watch the video here. [...]
Using iphone apps as a CRM tool « 'If only we'd thought of that' said
[...] example, Nissan CubeParty, Audi A4 driving game, Mercedes E Coupe memory game, VW New Polo and VW Golf GTi (another driving game) have all adopted this approach in some shape or form. There’s no [...]