Volkswagen has always built cars for the people. Their brand name in both German and Chinese literally means the ‘People’s Car’. Today in China, Volkswagen faces increased competition and a falling market share. To counter these challenges, they decided to refresh their strategy. Instead of building cars for the people, Volkswagen would begin building cars with the people.

We called it: ‘The People’s Car Project’ – a program to re-invent how cars are ideated, designed and built. To inspire the people to create new ideas for cars, we had to get across one simple belief: a car can be anything.

On the platform, we gave the people tools to create and share ideas about cars. To thank them for their submissions, we celebrated one highly-voted idea – a hover car created by a girl named Wang Jia – by bringing it to life.-The idea was prototyped and brought to Wang Jia’s hometown in Chengdu for her parents to test-drive.-Wang Jia was then led to a local cinema where we played a screening of her parent’s test drive, and surprised her with Chinese celebrity Le Jia, accompanied with a spectacular flash mob.-The hover car made its début at the Beijing Auto Show. We gathered interviews from everyone involved in this stunt. This will all be compiled into a future mockumentary.Audiences watched Wang Jia’s journey unfold on popular Chinese video platforms. “Hover Car” directed the people back to the platform to create and share their ideas.

The campaign attracted 11.6m unique visitors. 121,000 ideas were submitted. 3.1m fans follow us on social networks. In just 10 weeks, Volkswagen became the top car brand on social media, surpassing BMW, Mini, and Mercedes.Online Films – 13,070,844 viewsWeibo (Chinese Twitter) – 415,845 followersOnline Advertising – 35,614,978 clicksRegistrations - +300,000Source: Mediacom/Media Owner Reported Data 2/12