Winnebago owners longed for a sense of community, as stay-at-home orders kept them from the travel and people they loved.
The primary goal was to bring them “back together” by inspiring our community to share memories from the road as well as give them hope for the journeys ahead.
To create that sense of community amongst Winnebago owners, we wanted to lean into user generated content, giving the Winnebago social community connection even if they couldn't see each other on the open road. The campaign was meant to inspire our existing community, and highlight their shared love of hitting the open road. KPIs were set to evaluate the number of UGC submissions, impressions on the final video, and shares on social media, with a focus on higher engagement.
The Winnebago community is tight-knit and united in their desire to travel and share experiences with others. COVID hit this group especially hard, cancelling vacations and even the community’s annual meetup for the first time in 50 years. While quarantine was keeping our community apart, Winnebago had a unique opportunity to provide connection during the unprecedented time it was absent.
Introducing “On the Road Again.” A powerful, simple brand idea that united Winnebago’s owners and social community in a song of solidarity and hope. As RVers longed to hit the open road, the brand invited them to come together and share their favorite memories of travels past, and join in singing Willie Nelson’s iconic road trip classic, “On the Road Again.” We chose the song for its nostalgic nature and the rally cry it created to unite owners over their shared love of the road.
We knew owners used their rig not just as a vehicle for travel but for connection. By creating a campaign that used UGC as the primary driver, we let our community see themselves uniting under something larger than any one individual; and we created an anthem to celebrate the promise of the road ahead.
Creating a call and response UGC driven campaign meant we had a large ask of our audience to even get the campaign video launched.
Inspiring people to share personal photos is often difficult, getting them to sing on camera is even harder. This was a consideration when creating the website that gathered the content. Paying careful attention to UX, we created a sing-a-long video within the site that helped participants sing at the same pace, and tone, ensuring consistency across singing submissions.
With no paid media behind the campaign, we made our community part of the story from the beginning - creating a story about them as opposed to the brand.
In a series of organic posts, we inspired the heads of Winnebago owner groups on Facebook to champion the idea, motivating their members to participate. This effort, alongside our community's submission of UGC, resulted in a fully organic campaign driven solely by the love of our owners.
Additionally, for every share of the campaign Winnebago donated $1 to the National Park Foundation to support the iconic places our community would travel when the world opened up again.
The final video resulted in 3.9 million impressions with no paid media.
Additionally, our community submitted 579 unique pieces of content that have continued to be utilized in brand communications.
Share rates on the final video out-performed all previous Winnebago benchmarks: around 40% of all post engagements were shares. Through these shares, thousands of dollars were donated to the National Park Foundation, supporting the parks for all the road warriors to come.
While it wasn’t a primary goal of the campaign, we drove 610% more leads than anticipated, all attributed back to this video.
But most importantly, we brought our community together in a time they needed it, and the campaign produced the results it did as a sole credit to them.
