Audi Appoints Arvato Loyalty Services To Launch Q7 Experiential Campaign

(London: June 2007) Arvato loyalty services, the leading relationship marketing agency, has been appointed to create an experiential marketing campaign for the Audi Q7. arvato loyalty’s brief is to create buzz and visibility for the brand, overcome barriers to purchase and influence the hard-to-reach and even harder-to-impress premium SUV audience. The solution is an innovative test drive programme at high profile summer events.

arvato loyalty have created an experience which will support the brand’s ‘protective gear’ positioning when the message has greatest impact – when driving family and friends. The Q7 Season will see the brand’s presence at a series of upmarket family events over the summer. The experience will feature added-value test drives, tailored to each event to ensure the relevance of the cars and to add value to guests’ enjoyment of the event. For example, at Cornbury Music Festival, Q7 will be hosting a Secret Stage which can only be reached by Q7 and feature a series of artists playing exclusive acoustic sets.

The activity will target a combination of existing hot prospects (who will receive VIP invitations to attend the events courtesy of Audi, test drive a Q7 to the event and be chauffeur-driven home) and event visitors who will be offered the ‘value-added’ event experience.

The experience will be hosted by arvato loyalty’s highly-trained Q7 Brand Ambassadors, who will help event attendees to realise the Q7’s capabilities, offer test drives, provide comprehensive product information and ensure that the experience is a positive one.

As specialists in managing entire customer experiences across all touchpoints, and the agency which designed Audi’s prospect lead management system, arvato loyalty have fully-integrated the activity into a direct communication campaign which will use existing prospect data, and PLM system, telephone, email, SMS, fulfilment and PDA datacapture to ensure that no opportunity is missed and that Audi Centres sell cars directly as a result of the experiential programme. BBH, Audi’s creative agency will also be involved in ensuring that the activity achieves its communication objectives.

Ellie Lawford, Product Communications Manager, comments, “There is fierce competition in the category of marques of distinction, and market leaders such as Audi need to be bold in implementing with new ideas that will take us forward in the sector and build upon our dynamic media mix. We have chosen arvato loyalty as our experiential marketing partner because of their innovative and intelligent response to our brief and unique ability to manage data effectively around the campaign”.

Andrew Mitchell, Head of Sales, comments, “We are very excited about this opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of our joined-up approach to customer experiences. This will be a fully-integrated, data-driven and creative experiential marketing campaign, which we are confident will deliver bottom-line results for Audi.”