Background & context

The car brand sector is in rapid transition. And the climate objectives contribute massively to this transition meaning the industry needs to be climate neutral by 2050. Volvo is more ambitious and wants to be climate neutral by 2040.

One of the first major steps towards sustainability is moving all car sales online by 2035. Experts like Capgemini acknowledge that a complete online sales funnel has a massive sustainable impact.

The cancellation of the Brussels Motor Show (a yearly trade fair in January that normally acts as a kickoff of a 2 month sales momentum) provided an opportunity for Volvo to completely rethink its approach to how we buy cars towards a more digital & sustainable experience.

Creative challenge

We faced two challenges.

First, people in search of a new car want to see the car in real. Buying a car is for the most part an emotional decision. Biggest challenge was therefore to link physical attraction to a digital sales funnel.

Secondly, it’s a hassle to complete a car configuration online if you’re not an expert. The start to finish rate is 4% for people using the car configurator on volvocars.com.

Solution

We rethought the customer journey, starting from the Belgian streets. In terms of sales per inhabitant, Belgium is globally the second biggest market for Volvo, right after Sweden. With this many Volvo’s in Belgian streets it’s easy to spot one. This makes every Volvo in the street a potential starting point to pull prospects into our digital sales funnel. Did you spot the perfect Volvo? Take a photo of the car and get the exact configuration of the desired Volvo you just ran into. And requesting an offer is just one click away. You don’t have to go to the showroom (or Brussels Motor Show) anymore as the street is your showroom.

Execution

Volvo Street Configurator is the very first mobile web app that recognizes the configuration of any Volvo on the street. Thanks to advanced AI the tool can recognize the configuration of almost any Volvo in the street. Volvo labelled more than 100.000 photos to train the AI algorithms. The recognition tool gets automatically updated thanks to full integration with volvocars.com.

To get people to use the app, we invited everyone to look around them for inspiration with the claim “The street is our showroom”. This claim activates a psychological bias called the “frequency illusion”, that makes us see more Volvo’s if our attention is directed to it.

A national outdoor and digital campaign showed Volvo's shot in Belgian streets by three street photographers, activating the “frequency illusion” bias and generating traffic to the app (via QR code). All used media were targeting prospects while they were on the go and most likely to see a Volvo they like. From love at first sight to a pre-filled configuration (and a digital lead for an offer request), all in less than 60 seconds.