People’s Car Project

In 2010, Volkswagen was facing increasing competition with rivals offering greater model and brand choice. Chinese consumers were becoming more sophisticated and media usage behaviour was increasingly moving towards digitalisation. By 2011, digital Word of Mouth influenced the brand choice of 71% of car buyers. In response, Greenkern collaborated with the creative agency Goodstein to developed “The People’s Car Project”.

This campaign took the Volkswagen’s company name at face value and invited the people of China to design their own car by spreading and discussing their ideas on a variety of platforms.

Launched in May 2011, the PCP became the world’s largest crowd-sourced project, gathering over 14.4 million visitors, 495,000 fans on social media and 260,000 ideas. The first People’s Car (top idea among the first 104 ideas submitted) was displayed at the 2013 Shanghai Autoshow. Throughout the project, the campaign’s inspiring content and media activities helped to sustain PCP as one of China’s top 3 campaigns in terms of awareness. In addition, the PCP project helped to defend Volkswagen’s digital leadership and further contributed to positive net sentiment and brand advocacy.