Road safety has always been a very important focus for Volvo and remains so today. To maximize this safety we had to look beyond the more commonly known causes, look further than safety technology and turn our eye to the more hidden causes of accidents. We’ve found a blind spot that has been overlooked but is responsible for 50% of all road accidents in Belgium: stress.

Fourteen children get injured every day commuting to school. Volvo is a firm believer that number should be reduced to zero. That’s why Volvo not only massively invests in technological features that ensure the driver’s safety but also thinks outside of the box, or car in this case. Safety for everyone on the street is key.

Our brief was to generate awareness on Volvo’s inclusive take on safety where we look beyond car features and focus on making a positive impact for all road users.

Volvo has a history in safety and a strong reputation to defend. They are pioneers in making cars safe. They were the first brand to share their knowledge concerning safety with other car brands and they were also first to broaden their view on safety and include all road users.

However, safety is becoming more and more a commodity claimed by other car brands that introduce similar safety innovations. If Volvo wants to stay ahead in the game they have owned for decades, we need to create a societal and cultural dimension to safety.

That’s why we choose to build our campaign around the first day of a school year. For people with children this is a moment when they are personally confronted with road safety: their child is setting off for school in an environment that’s getting much more crowded with different road users all sharing the same space.

We knew we had to kick off our campaign on Sept. 1st (back-to-school) to create cultural impact concerning safety. But what should be our angle? What are the most important dangers on the road and how can we eliminate them?

We made a list by reflecting on our own behavior and it turned out stress could be a crucial and somewhat overlooked factor.

The VIAS Institute (Belgian institute for road safety) confirmed this. Their research shows that stress is the cause of 50% of all accidents on the road. Furthermore, the research also indicated that drivers are (25%) more stressed on the first day of school compared to other days. This led to the insight that if we can eliminate driver stress, we can make the roads safer for everyone.

To eliminate a significant cause of road accidents (i.e stress), we didn’t search for a solution through meditation courses or relaxing apps. We created a customer journey and found that the root cause of this stress was parents needing to be at work on time. This is especially true on the first day of school when routines need to be rediscovered and everyone has to find their place on the road again. After experiencing the emotional stress of the first day of school, perhaps an emotional goodbye at the gate followed by heavy traffic around the school, most parents then have to endure the stress of making it on time at work.

The solution: an employer that reassures you it’s ok to be late on the first day of school. Our campaign message was simple: be safe, be late. We’ve asked employers to spread this message to their employees.

More than 200 companies participated in the campaign, sending the ‘Be safe, be late’ message to more than 30.000 employees through a personalized toolkit they could use to run the campaign in their company. This included email signatures, mail templates, OOO messages, flyers etc.

On top of our paid media campaign that ran on all social channels, our message was also supported by relevant parent influencers who actively promoted the action and participated through their own channels. Thanks to this approach, we managed to reach 1.7M parents with this very important message.

But reaching our audience was not enough. By sending out traffic experts and Volvo spokespersons, we also caught the attention of the press and were present on all radio morning shows nationwide. putting the campaign right at the heart of popular culture and generating a nationwide discussion of how our work-life balance affects road safety.