Porsche Cars North America built a Porsche Experience Center (PEC) in Atlanta to provide an immersive brand experience for prospective buyers. The PEC gives consumers an easy way to become fully immersed in the Porsche brand, from exploring the elaborate space itself to test driving the newest sports cars. However, the PEC remains limited to those in the Atlanta region only, as this incredible center is the only one of its kind.
Our objective was to bring the PEC and the Porsche brand to both existing and prospective Porsche owners. With the limited reach of the PEC itself, our challenge was to use media to share this one-of-a-kind experience with Porsche's target consumer, while also ensuring the media reflect the high-end, quality of the brand itself.
Words, photos, and even video can't deliver the thrill of the Porsche Experience Center for anyone who hasn't experienced it in person. We needed to employ other tactics to pull potential Porsche drivers into this unique and difficult to replicate experience. Porsche saw this as the perfect opportunity to utilize emerging virtual reality platforms, allowing anyone to experience the feeling of sitting in a sports car and driving through the PEC.
We decided that the Porsche Virtual Reality App would be the crux of this program, but virtual reality for the masses was still brand new, and we wanted to make sure consumers without VR hardware could experience the PEC from anywhere they wanted from wherever they wanted.
To develop original content, we partnered with Conde Nast to document the VR filming process and showcase the iconic "making-of" experience with technology and car enthusiasts. All content was filmed for VR, providing us the content to develop Porsche VR App that sat at the center of this new experience.
And to ensure everyone could view the app in the right way, we created 5000 limited edition Porsche-branded Google Cardboard viewers. Each individually numbered viewer was wrapped in faux-leather to resemble the beautiful leather of the car's interior and featured a scannable code to easily direct people to the app. When viewers placed their smartphones to the Cardboard viewer, they instantly had a VR headset – and one that showcased the PEC experience unlike anything the brand had done in the past. The cardboards were sent out to Conde Nast influencers, Porsche loyalists and potential buyers.
The VR App, Conde Nast content and Google cardboards were harmoniously released at the same time, ultimately creating an immersive Porsche virtual reality experience with a variety of consumer entry points. We gave everyone from long-time Porsche loyalists to automotive and technology enthusiasts the feeling of driving a Porsche—all without actually gripping the wheel.
The Porsche VR App's first month alone, it facilitated 2.2x more virtual test drives than actual test drives from the United State's 188 dealerships combined.
Instead of mimicking the one-of-a-kind Porsche driving experience through words or traditional 2D video, we allowed consumers to be truly immersed in Porsche through virtual reality. Porsche VR lead to more than double potential driver experiencing the sights, sounds and feel of a Porsche sports car than the entire traditional test drive infrastructure.
