Volkswagen: Sticky message

The Post it campaign, designed for the Polo and Vento range, will focus on on-ground activities carried out by the dealers. The print ad campaign announces the contest in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and four other cities.

German auto giant Volkswagen has launched its new marketing strategy targeted for the festival season with its 'Post it' campaign. Yellow sticky notes stuck on the front page of the Hindustan Times in Delhi and Mumbai, and the Deccan Chronicle in Hyderabad invited readers to test drive its Polo and Vento range of passenger cars, along with the contest to win one of the two models.

A tad mellow compared to its earlier innovative and outstanding campaigns such as the Talking Newspaper and Tremor, Volkswagen has taken a 360 degree turn in its marketing strategy this time with emphasis on on-ground activities with its dealer network. However, the campaign will also be extended to digital and out of home media.

The campaign launched on November 1 will be carried out over three weeks to cash in on the festive mood. Already unravelled in Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad with a total circulation of 2.5 million copies, the print campaign will be expanded to Chandigarh, Pune, Jaipur and Ahmedabad in the coming days, spread over 4.5 million copies.

The print ad campaign is developed by DDB Mudra, while GroupM and Collateral Advertising are handling the on-ground activation and collateral, respectively. The digital activation is looked into by Grey Digital, the digital arm of Grey and MediaCom has been assigned as its media agency.

The on ground arm of the campaign will be taken forward by its 111 dealers in these cities, who will circulate around 2.5 million sticky notes at shopping centres, cinema tickets, parking areas and so on. "Our dealers are going to do local ads via Post-it notes and do a guerrilla campaign. We will also target hard this time and have identified clusters of our prospective customers with the help of our customer relationship management. We will build better customer-dealer relations," says Lutz Kothe, head, marketing and public relations, Volkswagen Passenger Cars.

While Volkswagen's earlier campaigns were brand oriented, which later became launch oriented, this time the mechanism is different. "Our October sales figures were higher than the previous months and this could not be overlooked since people were in a buying mood due to the festive season. The company expects at least 20 per cent rise in inquiries transforming into leads and then to sales. Till noon on Day One of the campaign, Volkswagen had already clocked 250 inquiries and was expecting 1,000 more by the end of the day,"

says Kothe.

There are two cars of each model to be won in the contest, Kothe adds. Two winners will be chosen from the lot of customers who book a new Polo or Vento during November. They will be given three questions at the time of booking. The right answers will then go through the process of lucky draw, with the results being announced in December.