sushi-making demonstration. Product displays of high-end bicycles and skis. A short-game golf clinic. Classes on exotic travel, kitchen design, and home theater. Music from a string quartet. Not what you would expect to experience at a product launch event for Audi of America Inc.

As one of the last high-end car importers to enter the sport-utility vehicle market in the U.S. with its Q7 SUV in 2006, the luxury auto company had to go into overdrive to market the new vehicle.

To add to this marketing challenge, Audi’s U.S. presence is not as formidable as many of its luxury peers. While the company is well known throughout Europe, where it was founded in Germany in 1909, Audi’s presence in the United States is still relatively new, beginning in 1969.

Now the United States accounts for approximately 10 percent of Audi’s overall worldwide sales. To increase this percentage and improve its brand recognition in the United States, Audi designed the Q7 specifically for the U.S. market. Audi headquarters expected a full 50 percent of Q7 sales to come from the United States. To reach such an aggressive sales goal, Stephanie Valentine, Audi of America’s general manager of experiential marketing, recognized that Audi needed “a more creative and innovative way of bringing Audi to market and creating brand awareness.”

Audi decided to take the new SUV on the road, with a 10-city marketing tour, the Streets of Tomorrow campaign. Audi chose the stops for the tour based on research that ranked the top 10 cities for its market: New York, San Diego, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami, and Dallas.

To identify target attendees, Audi sent direct mail and e-mail to existing Audi customers, as well as to Audi “considerers” — those who may not be part of the Audi family yet, but who have formally requested information about Audi vehicles.

Those interested in attending were required to pre-register for the free event online at a special Streets of Tomorrow Web site.

Like typical vehicle launches, attendees could demo the new vehicles at the events. Audi lived up to Streets of Tomorrow tour’s moniker by giving attendees the chance to test drive the Q7 on the streets of each host city. The event also included two closed-circuit courses that showed off the vehicle’s performance. The first allowed attendees to test drive several Audi models, as well as competitors’ vehicles in the same class as the Q7, from companies such as Lexus, BMW, and Volvo. The second course allowed them to do “hot laps” in the 2007 Audi RS 4 sports car, driven by professional drivers.

However, Audi also wanted to show potential customers that the new SUV, which costs anywhere from $39,900 to $49,900, is more than a high-performance vehicle — it is a lifestyle choice. “Our goal was to focus 50 percent on vehicles and 50 percent on lifestyle,” Valentine says. “To do so, we wanted to get people — many of whom aren’t familiar with Audi from a brand perspective — to experience not only the cars, but the brand, and to show them who we are and what we are about. Going around the tracks is great, but that doesn’t necessarily help consumers to get to know the Audi brand in a way that will appeal not only to auto enthusiasts but also to women, families, and non-driving enthusiasts.”

to affinity and beyond

To accomplish its lifestyle goal, Valentine and her team, aided by MVP Collaborative Inc., an event company headquartered in Madison Heights, MI, turned to affinity marketing — the practice of partnering with companies that don’t necessarily have anything in common with your brand except for the target audience you all serve. For Audi, that meant leveraging relationships with other high-end brands whose products or services represented the same premium value proposition as Audi: performance, quality, luxury, and personalization.

Audi paired up with companies such as Conde Nast Traveler magazine, exotic travel company Abercrombie and Kent Inc., and Ducati Motor Holding S.p.A., an Italian motorcycle company, which all market their products to a high-income audience.

At the events, these affinity partners joined together to create what Audi refers to as an educational “festival of innovation, technology, design, and performance” depicting the latest in upscale lifestyle trends. Participant Bang & Olufsen, for example, set up a living-room environment with one of its six-figure home-entertainment systems (which played family-friendly flicks such as “Finding Nemo” throughout each two-day event).

Attendees could browse product displays showcasing premium wares, including Gaggenau coffee machines from BSH Home Appliances Corp., bicycles from Seven Cycles Inc., and Atomic skis from Amer Sports Corp. They could also attend interactive activities such as cooking demonstrations by Max & Me Smoked Salmon Inc., demonstrations on how to download and organize digital music, and global-travel presentations by Abercrombie & Kent.

To help attendees navigate the many activities and to further emphasize the premium positioning of its brand, Audi also brought in a concierge who worked with guests to create a personalized event itinerary tailored to each individual’s unique interests.

“We were very purposeful in our targeting of partners and our selection of activities,” Valentine explains. “In trying to model the type of person who might own an Audi, we wanted to partner with other companies and bring in activities that would appeal to them and what they care about. We did that by partnering with brands that they know. This affinity appeal helped guests to better understand who we are and extended our own audience.”

Valentine and her team were equally purposeful in tailoring the Streets of Tomorrow tour to each of the 10 cities it visited by imbuing each event with its own local flavor. In New York, for example, New Yorker magazine cartoonists were on hand to showcase their work, and gourmet food was provided by local catering company Max & Me. In Texas the event took a more down-home turn with gourmet barbecue along with live entertainment provided by the Texas Gypsies, a local musical group.

Even the venues selected in each city became affinity partners of sorts, Valentine says. From the Southfork Ranch in Dallas and Belmont Park in New York, to the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles and the Computer History Museum in San Francisco, each venue was selected to represent Audi’s “out of the box” way of thinking and also to reflect the local culture and flavor of each stop on the tour.

making a connection

Affiliating itself with other brands and featuring activities that would excite its target audience also helped Audi to create an emotional connection with its customers — an accomplishment that Pam Danziger, author of “Let Them Eat Cake: Marketing Luxury to the Masses — As Well as the Classes” (Kaplan Business, 2005), says is not only an effective means of pitching product to the luxury class, but a necessary one.

“No one needs luxury transportation,” Danziger says. And while she notes that product features may be where most companies focus most of their marketing and development dollars, features are not the deciding factor for consumers, particularly those in the luxury market. “If you want luxury consumers to spend more than they might typically be willing to spend, they have to feel like they absolutely love the product and just gotta have it. Emotion is where the power is in that equation. If you want them to stretch to meet your price, you have to provide the right emotional experience.”

Judging from the palpable excitement of those on site, Audi did just that, Valentine says. “Regardless of which part of the country we were in, the enthusiasm attendees had for the program was universal. It was amazing. We’d observe people coming to the event in the morning, and four to six hours later, they would still be there. People would literally come and spend hours on site. Some stayed all day.”

driving home results

All told, the 10-city tour attracted just shy of 15,000 participants, 81 percent of which were new Audi prospects. The other 19 percent already owned an Audi vehicle.

Most important, Audi translated the enthusiasm of its attendees directly into sales. Audi worked with The Global Executive, an event-management and technology company in Ridgefield, CT, to implement on-site exit surveys consisting of bar-coded, multiple-choice questionnaires that attendees were able to answer in less than a minute using a hand-held scanner. By tour’s end, 9,400 attendees had completed the surveys.

The technology supporting the surveys allowed the company to compile and analyze attendee feedback in real time and then immediately feed data to Audi dealers throughout each region. By the end of December 2006, Audi had tied 2,800 vehicle purchases to the leads gathered on the tour.

Survey results also provided Audi with a daily indication as to whether the event was hitting its branding objectives. Ninety-one percent of attendees who completed a survey said that they “agreed or completely agreed” that attending Streets of Tomorrow improved their perception of the Audi brand, and 90 percent indicated that they were more likely to consider buying an Audi as a result of attending the event.

Attendees also requested 4,700 product brochures, and 38 percent of attendees requested that follow-up material regarding Audi of America be sent to them. Finally, the tour generated more than 100 media clips, resulting in 21.3 million impressions.

Valentine credits Streets of Tomorrow’s affinity approach with bringing consumers closer to the Audi brand in this way. “Every element at every event — from the food and the wine to the activities, atmosphere, and venue — felt comfortable to the attendees. They were doing things that they found enjoyable and interesting. The affinity angle helped us to accomplish both objectives.”

SARAH BOEHLE, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
editor@corporateeventmag.com