Background & Context

D’Ieteren, the leading Belgian car distributor (Audi, VW, Skoda, etc), was launching a new ‘private taxi transport’ service, HUSK. A saturated market difficult to penetrate.

As a start-up challenger with start-up budgets, HUSK’s looks to build up a steady (mostly B2B) client portfolio through fixed contracts as soon as possible. Public contracts to privatize key mobility solutions are a therefore a key target for HUSK: relatively high revenues, fixed contracts over longer time periods and potential for long term relationship building and cross-selling.

Creative challenge

Get start-up private transport company HUSK on the radar (‘a foot in the door’) of Government authorities for public mobility contracts (= recurrent revenues).

Quote Jonathan Guzy – CEO HUSK

These contracts are quite interesting for us because they provide recurrent revenue streams which are very important for a business like ours. It's a bit the foundation of the business. Once you have the foundation of the business, you can build around it. Such contracts really help us to build a foundation to grow and diversify.

Breakthrough thinking

What we needed instead of an ‘ordinary’ marketing or awareness campaign was a public affairs campaign: we needed to ‘move’ the government by ‘moving’ the public. And thé local angle - issue - presented itself, since it was all over the local news for the last 2 years: a huge and shameful local issue that we decided to resolve while at the same time resolving the business challenge.

The issue: For years, Belgium has been struggling with a great need for transportation for children with special needs, but a huge shortage of resources to organize this. Due to underfunding from the government, more than 5000 special needs children spend up to 8 hours in a school bus, each day. With few special needs schools and even fewer buses, poorly planned indirect routes must be taken to collect all children before dropping them off at school.

The idea

Husk & d’Ieteren present:

REDUCE THE RIDE

An initiative to get Flemish disabled children to school faster (on average: they commuted 4! hours a day).

Awaiting a structural solution from the government, HUSK voluntarily made its entire fleet of private minibuses and vans, and its innovative app and planning technology, available to the worst affected special needs children schools. Reducing the average time for a single ride from 2h58 to 36 minutes only!

Execution

We launched the initiative to the press with an emotional documentary film about the case of two special needs children, their parents, and supervisors: showing the effects of ‘ride times’ (and reduction of it) on the children’s’ well-being.

We went all the way by including an open CTA to all other schools to apply for our services. Bringing the solution could not be done half-pregnant.

In all we said and did we reached out to the Government as a constructive partner: proving our expertise in transport, technology & planning and reaching out to help instead of ‘blaming’ them.