summit automotive group

Summit Automotive Group (now part of Cambria Automobiles), was a 15 site car dealership network across London and the South-East. Trading under the Evans Halshaw and Doves brands, the dealerships housed Ford, Volvo and Jaguar franchises.

the brief As one of Ford's approved marketing partners, Summit approached Orchestra to help it raise its profile and increase footfall across all of its Ford dealerships. Having exhausted all communications with its own database, it needed to attract fresh prospects fitting the profile of the typical Ford customer.

With Dealership offers ten a penny, we needed to offer the public 'something a bit different' if we wanted to stand out. So, we took a leaf out of the National Lottery's book and decided to create a buzz with a prize draw. We created 'Lucky Windfall': a promotion featuring a range of prizes, including the top prize of a brand new Ford Focus.

450,000 Lucky Windfall wallets were door-dropped near the dealerships, with a further 50,000 made available for collection in store. A multi-media strategy was employed to create as much buzz as possible bringing a 'big event' atmosphere in the local area. Cover wrap advertising ran in local press covering 298,257 households. 5 bus backs were wrapped - one bus covering each of the 5 dealer locations, whilst advertising also ran on 12 trams between Wimbledon and Croydon, carrying the 'Lucky Windfall' message to in-car and pedestrian audiences. A high frequency radio campaign ran on local radio which drove traffic to dedicated Windfall websites for each dealership, built specifically for the campaign. Social networking site and forum posts including Facebook, MySpace, AllinLondon.co.uk, undergroundkent.co.uk and Yahoo Answers also signposted the campaign. And just for luck, Orchestra distributed an HTML email to 543 existing customers to make them aware of the promotion. As if they could have missed it!

The campaign was an overwhelming success. A total of 439,837 people were reached via press, whilst tram supersides reached 3.9 million people (based on yearly passenger numbers). The radio campaign reached 111,000 people, on average 7.5 times. The response was fantastic – unique visitors to the website increased 50% every week from launch with average length of a visit an impressive 4 minutes. Over the campaign period, sales year on year increased a very respectable 8%.