
Fanwagen
Issue 22 | March 2012
Agency
Achtung Amsterdam
Creative Team
Mervyn Ten Dam, Mathieu Garnier, Niklas Kristensen, Felicitas Olschewski
Production Team
Noam Erlich, Delia Lauret
Other Credits
Backend Development: B-Lex; Frontend Development: Thispage
Date
November 2011
Background
The challenge was to make Volkswagen the most likeable car brand on Facebook in the Netherlands and to get Volkswagen NL 30,000 ‘likes’ before the end of 2011.
Idea
Volkswagen the Netherlands invited its fans to vote for their all-time favorite model. As a reward, it promised to rebuild this model in a one-of-a-kind edition: the Fanwagen. Whether they voted for the classic Kombi campervan, the T1, or the much-loved Beetle, the winning car would be equipped with a host of features to make it the most social car ever built.
So, it would have a Feed-O-Matic, which would allow the winner to print their friends latest Facebook status updates straight from the dashboard of the car.
What about the poke button? It was there, sitting pretty on the steering wheel, ready to deman attention from all other road users.
And next to the Birthday notification system and the Friend finder (a map with all your friends’ hometowns plotted on it), the lucky winner was even able to set his or her relationship status on the license plate.
Hit things off with someone and the car’s owner could easily adjust its privacy settings. How? By opening or closing the curtains built into the car.
Results
The 30,000 likes were attained in just 12 days. At this moment Volkswagen NL is the most liked car brand in the Netherlands with over 60,000 likes.
Our Thoughts
Steve Barton, President of the Word Of Mouth Association, tells me that a Facebook ‘Like’ is worth $1.56. Certainly, brands are taking likeability in social media very seriously these days. Every ‘like’ is an invitation to keep the conversation going with a snippet of news, a game, a shared joke.
Why is this important? Well, it does rather seem that before people will buy your product, they do need to buy into your values first.
So, I like (and even ‘like’) this campaign because it is a perfect example of a brand mimicking human behaviour, simply setting out to be nice, to help people meet each other and to create a bit of a conversation.
And at stake, an amazing car! Retro is chic these days, so as well as telling us it has new, friendly values, VW is also reminding Dutch consumers that it has always been and still is the people’s car. Go suck on that lemon Peugeot, Citroen, Ford…