FamousGrey

Client: Volvo Car Belux
Product: Automotive
Title: The Street Configurator
Media: OOH 2m2, OLV, website
Country: Belgium
Date Of Campaign: 21/12/2021 - 28/02/2022

Background: 2022 started off with a disaster for the Belgian car industry. Due to COVID-19 the Brussels Motor Show was canceled. Volvo’s biggest sales momentum of the year accounting for 30% of the yearly sales target vanished. Customers were forced to switch to a digital environment, so Volvo needed to approach car sales in a whole new way. Our customer research in Belgium showed that the customer journey started off in the streets. People get attracted by a car and all its configured details just as it drives by, creating an instant attraction. Prospects want to receive an offer on that exact car that they had spotted in the streets, and they do not want to lose time doing a 10+ minutes configuration online trying to remember or guess the configuration they’ve seen before.

Idea: The Volvo Street Configurator. Turning the street into a showroom. Volvo wants to use the spark at first encounter to kick-start the purchase process.Since Volvo is one of the top-selling car brands in Belgium, we could ask people to look around them for inspiration. Spotted a Volvo you like in the streets? Take a photo and get to know everything about the desired Volvo you just ran into. From love at first sight to a detailed configuration. And to seal this love story, you can finish off by booking a test drive or request an offering right on the street, all in less than 60 seconds, Thanks to the very first app using advanced AI the tool can recognize the configuration of almost any Volvo in the street. Volvo used, shot, and manually labeled more than 100.000 photos to train the AI algorithms. The recognition tool gets automatically updated thanks to full integration with volvocars.com. This enables the AI systems to show updates directly. To increase the accuracy of our tool we sent photographers out in the streets to capture the models they came across from all different angles.These photos also formed the core of a national campaign inviting people to look around and spot the Volvos they like. The Volvo Street Configurator will change forever the experience of car configuration and enhances the recognition of Volvo as the leading human-centric yet innovative car brand.

Results: Turning the street into a showroom turned out to be a successful move by Volvo.The press announced it as the future way of buying cars.The advantage of a pre-filled configuration boosted the start-to-finish ratio of configurations by 450% for users of the Street Configurator in comparison to site visitors. This highlights how much easier the process became. The next steps in the funnel rose significantly too: offer requests went up by 29% and test drives climbed by +56%. This resulted in 4.492 sold cars in January, making it the best month ever in the history of Volvo Belgium. The tool is developed for Belux and given the results, 5 countries in Europe are already signing in for the tool in their country.