The Golf Plus is the Golf’s larger sibling, with more space and more cubby holes to store things of different sizes. Our brief was to differentiate the car and give our audience, the over 50s, a reason and encouragement to test-drive it. And this group, we discovered, are very keen gardeners. Because of this insight, we had an immediate hook.

We created The Golf Plus Book of Gardener’s Friends. This showed all the help gardeners have at their disposal, from the thrush who takes care of snails and the ladybird who takes care of aphids, to the frog who takes care of flies. Finally we showed that every keen gardener has a new best friend: the Golf Plus. That’s because with its clever use of space, it carries everything a garden could need, and so takes care of everything else.

Our assertion that the target audience would engage with a piece of communication that provided a defined benefit to them, which paid homage to a style and ritual close to their hearts and added real value along the way paid off. Customers responded in spades, giving it a response rate of 10.8%, which makes it Volkswagen’s most successful direct marketing ever, and over 200% more effective than all previous Golf Plus mailers.