Creative Execution

We invited our audience to engage with a 720 degree virtual car exhibition on mobile and PC, allowing exploration of smart’s fine design elements, encouraging posting and sharing on WeChat. We offered pre-registration, with a 999 RMB deposit, on WeChat 1 week before the final online sale. To ensure offline conversion, smart dealers followed up these sales leads within 24 hours, inviting them to visit the dealership. On sales day, targeted display ads and WeChat push-messages functioned as last minute reminders and triggers to purchase. Pre-registered users could buy the smart BoConcept car conveniently with only one click.

smart, yet again, proved they are at the forefront of digital campaign innovation, this time implementing the first-ever mobile commerce campaign in China. The results: • 388 smart cars were sold out in less than 3 minutes, achieving a generous ROI of 53:1 • 6,677 sales leads were collected within the week of the campaign. Of these, more than 25% placed deposit in less than 24 hours • 705,421 users engaged with the online “Virtual Car Exhibition” and generated almost 17.5 million reposts on Wechat • 1,810 new brand followers were recruited on smart WeChat official account through the campaign • Approximately 80,000 media reports around the event were generated • Total offline sales in April 2014 increased by over 23% year-on-year

Each year since 2010 (except 2011) we've partnered smart with different online platforms and, through campaigns, successfully sold between 200-666 smart cars in between 1.5-8.5 hours. This year smart aimed to sell 388 BoConcept Limited Edition cars through a digital campaign, and drive offline sales during April. For our target audience social currency is as or more important than the product itself. So, in China where normally 'bigger and more expensive' gives you bragging rights, we needed – with this tiny little car – to create an experience worthy of our target audiences attention and action. We turned to the platforms where our target audience lives and acts - mobile and WeChat - creating a full mobile eco-system where they could experience, share and buy the car, without having to leave their mobiles. By moving our thinking from category to culture, we ended up creating China's first mobile commerce campaign.