Fiat South Africa

Brand Repositioning Campaign A brand repositioning campaign I created for Fiat South Africa. It’s hard to believe today, but at the time, a large majority of the South African market believed Fiat was a Korean brand rather than an Italian one. The challenge was to reset that perception. I came up with the line “Forget What You Know.” Essentially, it was a reset button for the brand. The campaign was shot in a classic Italian black-and-white photographic style and rolled out in two phases. Phase 1 — The Tease The campaign launched at midnight on 1 January 2011. Mailers were sent out containing almost no information: just a dark image, a woman’s eyes visible through a narrow slit, the Fiat logo and the line “Forget What You Know.” The mailer drove users to a microsite, where they encountered something unexpected: floating red blood cells. The significance of the blood cells was deliberately kept hidden until Phase 2. The microsite featured an interactive game in which users had to move the floating red blood cells out of the way to reveal a partially hidden vehicle. That vehicle was the soon-to-be-launched Fiat 500. Users could then enter a competition to win a trip to the Italian Grand Prix. The response to the New Year’s midnight launch surprised all of us. Within the first eight hours, 30% of all recipients had clicked through the mailer and gone on to participate in the online competition. Fun Fact This was one of the last major automotive brand campaign sites in South Africa to be built using Flash — just before the technology began disappearing from the digital landscape.