August 28
Porsche helps you imagine a (virtual) dream car in your driveway
by Ken Chin
For decades, Porsche has been a symbol representing the best sports cars to come from Germany. Sadly for most of us, the direct correlation between the performance of a Porsche and the price of one has made it but a dream - highly sought after and desired, but unattainable. Audience poll: for the petrolheads, who among us did not have a poster of a Porsche on our bedroom walls when we were teenagers?
Porsche wants us to believe that owning one is a real possibility and has taken many steps to do so on their website. The splash page (pictured below) is a manifesto for us to just state that “I can” own a Porsche and it will become a reality.
The real genius of the marketers at Porsche comes through once you start exploring a particular model, say the Cayman. There is an option on the page marked “Picture It” that allows you to upload a photo of your house, and effectively Photoshop a Porsche in your driveway.
To help you envision this, Porsche provides you some basic tools to place the car on your photo and adjust it for size, perspective, clarity, etc. so that you can try to make the image look as natural as possible. Here’s one that I made:
Once you finish your image, Porsche allows you to save it as a wallpaper (with some Porsche marketing messaging and imagery),
and as an email-friendly size JPG for you to send to your friends which, incidentally, does NOT have any Porsche messaging - allowing you to easily brag to your friends about owning a Porsche without actually owning one.
For Porsche (and sports car) enthusiasts, this is a great application that allows users to take Porsche’s properties and literally bring them to their desktops. Furthermore, users can propogate Porsche’s content beyond the confines of the user’s PC with the “bragging rights” images that can not only be emailed to their friends, but can also be uploaded to social networking sites, other blogs, etc.
The downside is that brand detractors can create silly or even controversial images using the same assets (for a refresher, see GM’s failed attempt at user generated commercials here), like so:
However, considering the strength of Porsche’s brand and the desirability of its vehicles, giving users control over its assets is not really a gamble as the odds are greatly in Porsche’s favor that this campaign will generate more positive buzz and brand equity than negative. For other brands who want to explore giving users control, it is critical to assess their own brand’s value before potentially opening a Pandora’s Box and tarnishing the brand’s image.









