VW introduces a test drive for social good

His journey arose out of an advertising agency brief to generate test drives for the Volkswagen Amarok in South Africa. Ogilvy & Mather Cape Town’s Nicholas Wittenberg said “we sort of had an AirBnB moment as we realised that we could create a peer-to-peer connection between two parallel worlds - potential pick-up owners who are driving around every day to no purpose beyond a limited and self-contained trial of the vehicle in a tarred urban environment and the thousands of organisations and communities which are in desperate need of a pick-up to make urgently needed deliveries in inaccessible places."

The result was the Amarok Social Test Drive which re-purposed the routine test drive into a beneficial programme of community interventions around South Africa and, in the process, provided a demonstration of the virtues of the vehicle.

The initial challenge was to find a way to connect the drivers with the deliveries. “We began on a small scale by using social media sourced entries for a digitally-based competition to find five Social Test Drivers for a predetermined cause”. This resulted in Siyabonga making his journey to Lady Frere and other deliveries of books and other supplies for under-resourced schools, and desperately needed provisions for an animal sanctuary.

A viable concept

Wittenberg says the initial programme demonstrated the viability and the appetite for the concept and “we now have a massive vision for it as the dealerships are starting to connect with local organisations that they can support on a regular basis with every Amarok test drive”. Amarok Social Test Drives are also being deployed to meet immediate crises. Volkswagen was approached by Operation Hydrate to deliver four, one-ton loads of fresh water bottles to Senekal in the rural Free State in the midst of the worst drought the area has seen in decades.

Nicholas believes the power of the idea lies in its scalability: “There’s no reason why every Amarok dealer around the globe can’t do this quickly and easily which means there is a huge upside for ‘delivering’ social good.”