Track Day Invitation
Issue 14 | March 2010
Agency
RAPP New Zealand
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Wayne Pick, Head of Copy: Kim Pick, Copywriter: Darryl Wong, Art Director: Kenton Osmond, Designer: Katie Benge
Production Team
Production Manager: Marcel de Ruiter
Other Credits
Account Director: Ruth Coulson, Account Manager: Jane Fleming
Date
July 2009
Background
The 2008/09 economic recession hit car sales hard. Just getting prospective customers in for a test drive was proving difficult enough, let alone enticing them to buy a new car. That was exactly the challenge: to get current owners and a group of prospects to test drive the latest Golf GTI and create sales leads for the dealers to follow up.
Idea
In place of a test drive, the target audience of 1500 existing and potential GTi owners was invited to a private Track Day, where they could put a new Golf GTI through its paces on a closed race-track. It was known that Golf GTI drivers loved driving and performance cars, so the agency used a competitive leader board, like the one on the Top Gear TV show, as a way in. Anecdotal feedback was that the personalised leader board magnets held pride of place on customers’ fridges as a reminder of the much-anticipated day.
Results
Instead of the 20% target, dealers reported an unprecedented 88% response rate and exceptional sales leads. The Track Day was filled to capacity, generating 212 sales leads. The first sales were made within one day of the event and within weeks $460,000 worth of new GTI sales had resulted directly from customers who had attended the Track Day. Within three months, the Auckland dealership had sold out of Golf GTIs.
Our Thoughts
All credit here goes not so much to the creative team who produced this mailing but to the marketer or the strategic planner or whoever it was who said “Let’s have a Track Day”. That’s the ‘big idea’ here, a genuinely smart way of getting people to get behind the wheel of a new GTi and to drive it. But harder and faster than they would do on the main roads of the city. And competitively. What this mailing does is remind recipients through its allusion to Top Gear that driving can be glorious, tyre-smoking fun. It puts motorists back in touch with their inner Toad. Poop poop. (That’s a reference to ‘Wind in the Willows’ and Mr. Toad, an early incarnation of Jeremy Clarkson.) I would certainly have taken up the offer.