Parent Taxi App

Brief

Project Summary

Based on insights that among the many jobs parents take on, unofficial taxi service for their family is one – ŠKODA found the average parent drives over 1,600 miles a year ferrying their children around. To help strike a fairer family balance, we created the Parent Taxi app, which, using GPS, allows parents to charge their kids in chores for the distance they travel taking them to extracurricular activities.

Launched at the start of the school summer holidays, the campaign was created to help build brand perception and drive awareness of the ŠKODA Karoq, among a target family audience.

The campaign received widespread media coverage, generated strong social commentary including an influencer programme, and to date the app has been downloaded over 5,850 times. Crucially though, it drove 6.5k+ people to the Skoda website and generated 148 leads – only £337/lead.

Objectives and Strategy

Objectives for the campaign were split into 3 broad areas – Brand, Communications and Business.

ŠKODA were looking for a campaign that had earned media at its heart to raise brand awareness and appeal of ŠKODA, particularly within the important family target audience. Their conquest audience is 35-54-year-old men and women, with a focus on increasing female interest in the brand which has traditionally been a very rational male brand.

ŠKODA’s new Karoq is part of the SUV range and is aimed at this target audience. It is a competitive marketplace so we needed to create a campaign that built awareness of the car and its key features in a way that our audience would identify with.

Our communications objectives focused on generating strong media coverage in auto and non-auto media that our target audience consumes. Additionally, we needed to engage our audience online, in the social communities where they congregate.

The business objective was to create app downloads, drive consumers to the ŠKODA website & Karoq page, and ultimately generate leads (brochure requests, test drive enquiries and finance enquiries).

The strategy was driven by several important insights into both the brand and audience.

On the audience side, the customers were identified as over-indexing on having children under 18.

On the brand side, the ŠKODA brand is generally favoured by more rationally driven customers, so we need an idea that fits those two broad areas.

These two observations helped us direct further audience research via a survey that found Britain’s parents drive approximately 1,648 additional miles a year ferrying their children around! That’s the equivalent of an incredible £12,565 worth of taxi fares if parents were to charge their kids the average London taxi cost-per-mile rate.

In addition, two-thirds of parents said they sometimes feel like a taxi service for their kids; spending on average an extra three hours in the car each week driving their children to places such as friends’ houses and sports clubs.

While most parents feel like a taxi service to their children, the majority are happy to do it. As a result, we wanted to come up with a campaign that parents would hopefully see the ‘value’ in but that would also be something fun and engaging for parents and kids to enjoy alike.

Combining the insights above and the intention to create something purposeful and engaging, we came up with the ŠKODA Parent Taxi app.

Process

The app allowed parents to exchange miles driven for their kids for chores. Much like in a normal taxi, when parents start their journey to drive their child somewhere, the app tracks the car journey using GPS.

Rather than a monetary value per mile, the app allows parents to set a ratio of how many miles equate to a single chore. Once the drive is completed, the app totals the miles travelled and reveals the number of chores owed by the child for the journey.

The app then produced a bespoke chore receipt which parents could then share to the child’s smartphone via text or email, or on social media if they want to be particularly devious! The app also keeps track of past journeys and fares, as well as tracking the total amount of journeys for fun future conversations!

Pre-Launch

We developed an instructional video which introduced the campaign and showed parents how to use the app. We worked with well-known parent blogger Slummy Single Mummy (SSM), who appeared in the video with her daughter, to come up with the creative for the video.

The use of SSM helped boost awareness of the campaign and product within a female audience, which made up 88% of her 178k fans, many of which are parents themselves. Involving SSM from early in the campaign we ensure participation and enthusiastic and authentic sharing to her audience.

Launch

We launched the app at the start of the summer holidays as parents are even busier than usual being a taxi to their kids.

Alongside our instructional video, we also distributed a series of images and a press release to media and influencers.

To ensure we were driving consumers to the ŠKODA website, we developed a campaign landing page which housed all the content. The app was available to download through both iTunes and Google/Android or through the landing page.

SSM posted a series of content at launch, 6 x social posts (2 on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) and 2 x blogs.

The Parent Taxi content was activated on Facebook with a £5k media spend budget. The content was targeted to parents with children aged between 8-16 years old.

Post-launch

Over the summer we loaned a number of ŠKODA vehicles out to media and influencers who have children. They then downloaded the app for the duration of their loan and wrote up their experience of the app in the articles.

Effectiveness

The campaign was inspired by a universal truth for all parents, as identified in the survey conducted, and led to the creation of a campaign that genuinely resonated with the family target audience and offered a useful solution to the problem identified.

Not only did it generate widespread media coverage for ŠKODA across many of the national publications, helping to drive awareness of the Karoq, but these articles were then shared 42,000 times, and drew positive social commentary from parents, proof that the campaign appealed to the intended target audience.

These articles, alongside the paid social activity, drove consumer action with nearly 7,000 visitors to the ŠKODA website and a high percentage of them going onto download the app, and become leads.

Communications Objectives

Estimated campaign reach – 2.5m (1.33m media and 1.2m social)

Media Results

51 pieces of coverage (included 13 pieces of national coverage)
65% non-auto coverage
92% positive sentiment on coverage
42,000 article shares
Appeared organically on four high reaching, high engagement Facebook community groups e.g. Pretty 52 (now Tyla) with 85% positive sentiment

Social Results

8,852 engagements
28,027 video views

Business Objectives

6,691 visitors to Karoq landing page
5,850 app downloads
4mins 36 secs average dwell time on webpage – 199% increase on the average dwell time for ŠKODA.co.uk
57 brochure downloads
27 people visited book a test drive page
47 unique finance calculation completed