Why it is that people are so blindly attracted to Porsche. And not just driving it, when Porsche lovers see a car drive by their heads turn and they stare until the car disappears into the distance. We set out to find what makes a mechanical car provoke such an emotional and visceral response with the help of neuroscience. Could addiction be the explanation of this irrational behavior? We partnered up with renowned neuroscientists Prof. Dr. Victor Lamme to find out. Together, we investigated the addictive nature of a Porsche by comparing the car to other addictive triggers such as chocolate, sex and alcohol. Instead of creating a big campaign around the car, we used the research paper by Lamme as our medium to generate free publicity for Porsche in a way that focuses fully on what makes a Porsche different from other cars.

We, together with Prof. Dr. Victor Lamme from the faculty of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam, performed neuroscientific research and wrote a paper. In the research 21 Porsche-drivers were shown short films of a similar driving experience in different cars, including Porsche. They were also shown several stimuli known for activating addictive behavior. The results indicate that the positive emotion that occurs when seeing a Porsche stimulates the Nucleus Accumbens, the pleasure area in our brain.

The result of the research became the key to the rest of our campaign. We released a video explaining the paper in a way the non-academic crowd would understand, including mouthwatering shots of a Porsche that would make any addict get the jitters. The story about the research was released to the press, together with an interview with Professor Lamme and an infographic explaining the basics of the research findings.

Tier 1:

The independent Porsche dealers were unified under the brand theme and are now tailoring their service to become more Uncommon

Porsche Global is freeing up resources to develop the brand theme beyond the Dutch market

Tier 2:

The story about our scientific paper got unanimously positive press coverage: it got featured in the biggest publications read by Porsche customers: Financieel Dagblad (Financial Times of NL), the Parool (big mainstream newspaper) and even in Metro, the most read paper in the Netherlands.

A total of 350,000 euro in free publicity (for reference: Porsche Netherlands spends about 250,000-500,000 on media per year)

Tier 3:

We are still waiting for the final results, but Porsche dealers expect to see an uptake in test drives thanks to this campaign.