After 20 years of growth, Audi was facing into some troublesome times. A saturating premium market and an over-reliance on selling lower value models was damaging brand perceptions. Audi lacked excitement and, at worst, consumers were calling the brand “dull.”

With Audi facing such issues, the natural inclination would be to try and raise the Masterbrand’s profile. But with the guiding light of Vorsprung Durch Technik - a belief in progress through technology - we decided to take a more progressive step: to use a sub-brand to turn the Masterbrand around.

Econometric analysis uncovered that, in order to grow Audi amidst this overcrowded market, we needed to focus on ‘Brand Desirability’, a metric that was predominantly driven by increasing the key KPIs of excitement, performance and attraction. The model identified that a 10% shift in desire would have, on average, a 3.7% impact on sales.

The answer became clear, we needed to focus on Audi Sport, a performance sub-brand that, while it had lower awareness, made Audi’s most desirable cars. A deep dive into our audience’s ownership motivations then led us to cristalise our ‘Speed isn’t everything’ proposition and highlight the unique character of RS models or its drivers for each Audi Sport campaign. By shining a spotlight on RS 3 and the R8 Coupe, we improved Audi’s Brand Desirability by 7%. This helped sell over £180M worth of cars, across Audi’s entire range - not just Audi Sport - helping Audi progress into the future.