Volvo is creatively brave. When I started working with them they'd dangled their CEO off a crane, trained a hamster to drive a quarry truck and commissioned the most viewed YouTube clip in automotive history - the one with the rubber-legged Belgian doing the splits between two trucks.
Volvo's wonderful campaigns created huge awareness and won them prestigious awards. But sales didn’t follow.
Volvo is great at awareness. But as an organisation, they'd never been good at communicating what makes them, and their trucks, better than every other truck brand in the world.
Our job was to help them do this. We were to make Volvo the number one truck brand in the world. And to redesign their digital channels to help them convert the high levels of awareness into engagement, sales and improved service. We'd also have to roll everything out across 147 countries and in 87 languages - but that was the easy bit.
Every part of the digital experience was up for grabs. New content, new designs, new interactions, new components. But the new stuff had to wait. This was about solving an old problem. How do you communicate that your brand (which in this case uses the same metal, nuts, bolts and technologies as its competitors) is measurably better than the rest?
The answer was relatively simple. But it took a lot of coffee, scribbling and swearing to get there.
