How do we get the public involved in a brand that is otherwise standoffish?

Art. Hashtags. Location. Swag.

 

Fellow data & analytics interns Chase Chapman, Connor Lund and I were tasked by Audi to come up with a concept of a millennial facing Audi Collection over the course of two months. Audi's retail sales were down 76% as of June, 2018. To address this, they wanted to target their newest consumer demographic. We delivered a scalable concept rooted in emotion, lifestyle, and of course, trendiness.

 

Part of the reason Audi isn't having success within the retail realm is that they have little to no social media presence, their website is outdated and has many pain points which I have assessed. 

The current Audi Collection Site:

›Difficult to navigate

›Excess of product options

›Overuse of pop-up windows

›Website does not scale properly

›General lack of clarity in checkout process

›Imagery is not fitting for a younger demographic

So we set out to solve all of these problems. 

Within this website, we introduce consumer lead customization, a filtered down selection of items, clearer navigation and checkout process, and a campaign page baked in. By segmenting the collection into styles (as seen in Adore, Attitude, Automate, Advocate, and Abstract) we're allowing people to personalize their shopping experience by identifying with a style they enjoy. Based on competitive research, we found this to be an effective method. Each style also links to a moodboard showcasing art, lifestyle imagery of products, as well as an article from Audi of an interesting PR project they have done that relates to that style. Another thing we found in our research of Audi is that they do a lot of great stuff, but they're not exploiting it, so here we have an avenue to do so. 

On to the campaign.

The main challenge was making a meaningful connection between the online retail site and a pretty abstract campaign, other than just a “campaign” page of course. Since people are primarily doing all their shopping online, the only thing we can really offer consumers other than a product is a memorable experience. This is why a campaign of some sort to raise awareness of the Audi Collection/Audi’s values in general is necessary. Our version of this would entail setting up a large “A” statue in popular areas in cities we’ve selected and assigned one of our six categories (for instance, Achieve is for New York City, NY). Within these cities, we could partner with artists, and recruit them to style the sculpture in their vision based on a simple prompt of the verb assigned to their city (i.e “Achieve”). An event like this extends the idea of GenA as something for the people, it simply stands as a signifier for this movement, and through it, the public can make it their own based on what it means to them.

Of course, social media plays a big role in young people’s lives - everything must be shareable. Not only that, but it is key for supporting our campaign concept by allowing for an ongoing event over a large span of time. The use of hashtags on Instagram when people inevitably upload their photos with the sculpture would ultimately result in a trend that raises awareness of GenA, and in turn, introduce Audi to the younger generation in a relatable and exciting way. Hashtags are also great for starting movements and trends, this is why we have #generationA as part of the “brand” language. The GenA social media pages should be a culmination of updates on the campaign, stories of Audi’s public works projects, updated lifestyle photos, and a peppering of art and design. The language should be personal, slick, and most importantly consistent across all aspects of our system. We want to unite our campaign with the social media pages so that everything is connected and working together to support the GenA sub-brand with confidence and a strong sense of style and identity. Declaration of personality and values (typically referred to as essence) is key to a good brand.

Packaging matters

Packaging is a commonly forgotten, yet very important consumer touchpoint. Essentially, it's a smaller scale user experience that should be designed to be enjoyable and memorable. When people do order something from the Gen A website, the brand essence shouldn’t stop there. Research shows that the look and feel of packaging does have a significant impact on the consumers perception of a product, and can be a factor in if they choose to buy from a place again. This is why we have generated sleek, black packaging that utilizes the real estate of the three dimensional box, unlike the current Audi packaging which is a standard cardboard box with Audi tape. The unboxing experience is important to millennials, so we want to cater to that and make it memorable. Including stickers in packaging allows for not only a fun takeaway for people, but also an easy way to advertise in unique areas (assuming people use them), as well as a place of further real estate for things like thanking the consumer and coupon codes.