John Froda responds to the podcast James and I did with Neville and Shel and talks about Volkwagen’s launch of its new car with Project Fox, in Copenhagen.
The campaign is taking place all over Copenhagen these days: Volkswagen’s Project FOX claims to be a gift to the new urban generation. They aim at bringing “together young artists designers, cooks, hotel industry professionals and managers to develop and implement their own ideas”
John reports mixed responses: some think its a good example of working with customers, others see it as phoney.
In the podcast, I used the metaphor of a swimming pool. At the deep end are things like Linux, where the product itself is co-created with customers. At the shallow-end are examples where companies invite customer participation in some aspect of promotion. Well, in terms of the Fox Car, this towards the shallow end: the target audience get to participate in designing a hotel, not the car. But in terms of creating the Fox Hotel, it’s somewhat deeper.
It’ll be interesting to see where VW take this next…
