PAINTING GERMAN CARS IN BRITISH COLORS

TitlePAINTING GERMAN CARS IN BRITISH COLORS
BrandEMIL FREY AG
Product/ServiceCARS
Category A03. Cars & Automotive Products & Services
Entrant AGENTUR AM FLUGHAFEN Altenrhein, SWITZERLAND
Idea Creation AGENTUR AM FLUGHAFEN Altenrhein, SWITZERLAND
Additional Company EMIL FREY AG St. Gallen, SWITZERLAND
Credits
Name Company Position
René Eugster Agentur am Flughafen Chief Creative Officer
Dominique Rutishauser Agentur am Flughafen Art Director
Valeria Hoerler Agentur am Flughafen Graphic Designer
Patrick Lindner Agentur am Flughafen Copywriter
Miriam Egli Agentur am Flughafen Communications Manager
Julia Luechinger Agentur am Flughafen Junior Marketing Consultant
Maximilian Eugster Agentur am Flughafen Intern

The Campaign

We wanted to convince owners of older German cars to switch to a British car (Jaguar or Land Rover). To find these car owners, we used their license plate numbers to find their addresses and send them a direct mailing. The mailing contained a small pot of paint in British racing green, the color that has been used for decades by the British racing teams on their cars. This allowed the recipients to simply paint their German cars in British colors – or to schedule a test drive instead.

Creative Execution

They sent the owners an elegant black box with a small pot of car paint in original British racing green. The German car owners were encouraged to paint their own car green for that British driving experience or – better still – to pay a visit to Emil Frey and test-drive a quintessentially British car. The first batch of the total of 200 mailings was sent in September 2016.

Results

Mailshots were sent out in a number of batches and followed up with a telephone call. As a result, 9 per cent of those receiving a mailshot signed up for a test drive. As the promotion is still ongoing there are no definitive figures available as yet, but the number of vehicles sold is already in the double digits. The media also reported on the promotion, and on the British cars on offer at Emil Frey.

The mailing used addresses that were collected using license plate numbers, so it was tailored precisely to the recipient and therefore could use the relevant data creatively.

Sales representatives at Emil Frey combed parking lots across the region to find cars made by German manufacturers, noted their registration numbers, then used the Swiss Autoindex database to find the addresses of the cars’ owners. These car owners then received a mailing encouraging them to test-drive a quintessentially British car.