Volkswagen Generates $4m Revenues through iPhone App
Written on Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Going through my RSS Reader this morning, I came across this post from Murat, of Mobile Inc. who posts about how Volkswagen used an iPhone app to generate over $4 million in car sales.
Now, I was particularly intrigued by this, because buying a car is not the type of thing you do through your phone (even if it IS an iPhone!!), like you would when ordering pizza, for example. In most cases iPhone apps make companies money because iPhone users can directly order their products, through the iPhone, which makes it possible to link the purchase to a specific user and so track the profits.
So how exactly did the car manufacturer make money from their iPhone app? Murat explains:
Volkswagen, with the help of AKQA, decided to create a car game, but rather than go through the risk and cost of building one from scratch they decided to reskin a already established racer on the market. So they took the popular racing game called Real Racing (retailing at $4.99) and created a sponsored version of the game, calling it “Real Racing GTI”, then gave it away for free.
As you can imagine the game features the Golf GTI as the selectable car and features VW branding throughtout.The clever bit is that users were invited to use the iPhones GPS functionality to locate their nearest dealer. This data enabled AKQA to directly trace purchases of the GTI Mark VI directly back to the app.
On top of all that, VW added incentive by challenging players with the reward of winning one of 6 real Golf GTI. Spot on.
And onto the numbers...
175 cars sold to registered players of the application, 50% of those sales to new customers.
The car retailed for $23,000, making at least $4 million in revenue.
Clickz.com makes a very valid point in that those are only the sales directly linked with the application. Once you look at the huge amount of ratings the app received (50,000) as well as it hitting number one in the download charts, the brand awareness must have also been sky high.
A great example of how mobile marketing, when done right, just has no match...
Posted in
iPhone,
mobile marketing
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The iphone is indeed the supreme platform for game apps, I give my thumbs up to this.