Volkswagen uses an iPhone app to generate over $4 million in car sales
Volkswagen, with the help of AKQA, decided to create a car game, but rather than go through the risk and cost of building one from scratch they decided to reskin a already established racer on the market. So they took the popular racing game called Real Racing (retailing at $4.99) and created a sponsored version of the game, calling it “Real Racing GTI”, then gave it away for free.
As you can imagine the game features the Golf GTI as the selectable car and features VW branding throughtout.
The clever bit is that users were invited to use the iPhones GPS functionality to locate their nearest dealer. This data enabled AKQA to directly trace purchases of the GTI Mark VI directly back to the app.
On top of all that, VW added incentive by challenging players with the reward of winning one of 6 real Golf GTIs
And onto the numbers...
175 cars sold to registered players of the application, 50% of those sales to new customers.
The car retailed for $23,000, making at least $4 million in revenue.
Clickz.com makes a very valid point in that those are only the sales directly linked with the application. Once you look at the huge amount of ratings the app received (50,000) as well as it hitting number one in the download charts, the brand awareness must have also been sky high.
A great example of how mobile marketing, when done right, just has no match...
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Mobile Adver-Gaming Helps PUMA Connect With Consumers During Shanghai F1 Race
PUMA, one of the world’s leading sporting footwear company, launched a major mobile campaign recently to coincide with the Formula One race that took place in Shanghai. It was a comprehensive campaign that included a mobile internet site, adver-gaming, coupons, banners, and search.
The PUMA campaign was put together by Phonevalley (part of Publicis) and Zenith China. The objective of the campaign was to increase brand awareness in China by introducing PUMA’s brand and culture in a fun, original way to the Chinese market.
The link with FormulaOne was a natural for Puma, which has a long history in the world of motorsports, and even has a special line of “Scuderia Ferrari” shoes.
The “F-Wan” Game
The main focus of the campaign was a mobile game called “F-Wan”, which sounds like “F1″ and means “Play” in Chinese. It is a car racing game (no surprise!) which consumers could download from the Puma mobile internet site. The game showed 4 cars racing along a special “Puma” shaped race course.
To make the campaign even more attractive and interactive, Puma set up a number of ways for players to earn prizes. For example, players could submit their race scores to PUMA by SMS and thereby receive points. And, in order to increase the viral aspects of the campaign, points were also given to players that forwarded the game to their friends.
The top 3 players each week were awarded PUMA F1 merchandise like shoes, bag and hats. Players could also get wall papers and mobile “themes” based on the race game to let them personalize their phones.
Promoting the Game
To drive traffic to the mobile site and the mobile game download, the media plan covered all available mobile channels in the chinese market.
- Banners and text links were displayed on the top three Chinese mobile portals: QQ, 3g.cn and Kong.net
- SMS short-codes were integrated in all PUMA out-of-home and print ads. When a used sent ‘PUMA F Wan’ to the campaign short code, they received a clickable SMS with a link to the PUMA mobile Internet site
- WAP push (clickable SMS) were be sent to PUMA members
- SMS mobile search: mobile users who search for any sport related information are sent an SMS which includes a direct link to the PUMA mobile Internet site
Bringing business to the stores
Another objective of the campaign was of course to drive business for PUMA. There are 350 PUMA stores in China, and in order to bring traffic to the stores, PUMA sent an MMS coupon to each person that downloaded the mobile driving game. The coupon was redeemable for a mobile phone accessory in the store.
The mobile site also had a store locator function
to help consumers find the nearest PUMA retailer.