Skoda: New Recipe for Success

While it’s always good to keep punters amused, joking at your expense isn’t always the best form of publicity, as car manufacturer Škoda will attest to. So how do you turn your product from being the butt of all jokes into a trendy must-have item with a growing market share? Joe Lancaster brings us up to speed on how one company used its undesirable tag to create a brand new status

How do you double a Škoda’s value? Fill the petrol tank.

No one enjoys being the butt of playground jokes, but while most people get over their nasty nicknames by the time they’ve left school, it’s a bit different for a car manufacturer.

For years its brand was ridiculed and its cars labelled ‘skips on wheels’ by kids and adults alike, but Škoda wasn’t laughing. Children were literally crying in their showrooms, begging their parents not to sign away their street cred and drive them to school in a laughing stock. Until the end of the 80s though, the cars deserved it.

Start of a beautiful friendship

Following the Velvet Revolution and subsequent end of communism in late 1989 Czechoslovakia, most of the country’s industries, including automotive, were privatised. In early 1991 the new government struck a partnership deal with the Volkswagen Group to embark on a joint venture that would see the German manufacturer investing heavily in revitalising the Škoda Automobile factories, developing employee skills and, more crucially, its products.

The 1998 Octavia was the first fully revamped Škoda released by the partnership. It was backed by the brand’s highest-ever spend for a marketing campaign, but while it received rave reviews and bowled over the press, the public’s negative perception of the brand hung around like the smell of petrol. The launch was a flop, so much so that Škoda moved just over 6,000 cars in the next 12 months – four fifths of buyers were over the age of 45.

In stepped Fallon London, a new agency formed in the year of the Octavia’s release. After signing Škoda, they were presented with the kind of challenge that every good agency thrives on – a client that had massive brand awareness (albeit negative) with a great product and a sophisticated distribution network. One of Fallon’s founding members, Andy McLeod (now a director with Rattling Stick) remembers the dilemma. “It was very much part of the zeitgeist in the UK that Škoda made rubbish cars – it was kind of a given and we had to hold our hands up and let people know that we got that before they’d take us seriously. If we’d said ‘another great car from Škoda’ people would have said, ‘well, I’ve heard they’re all shit, so maybe this one’s shit as well,’ so we had to wipe the slate clean in public and move on from there.”

Taking it on the chin

In 2000 VW finally took complete control and for the launch of the brand’s next car, the Fabia, McLeod and the Fallon team built a campaign around the endline, ‘It’s a Škoda. Honest’. First print posters were released, followed by three Fredrik Bond-directed TV spots with similar themes – one featured an important guest receiving a grand tour of a Škoda factory, marvelling at the operation and the vehicles in production before commenting, ‘I hear you make those funny little Škoda cars here, as well.’ “It was good timing [for Fallon to sign Škoda] because we couldn’t have done those ads unless the product had been up to it. If the new Fabia wasn’t such a good product the campaign would have fallen flat on its face,” says McLeod, who also explains how the campaign’s self-deprecating nature endeared people to the brand.

“It brought Škoda to the public’s attention that actually, it didn’t make shit cars anymore and I think what appealed to people was that it tapped into a truth about what they really thought. We did all think they were shit and I think people liked the advertising because it understood that and took the piss out of itself. The company was able to say, ‘look, we know you think our cars are shit and we accept that’, which was very difficult for them to do.”

It was a brave move and McLeod fondly remembers Škoda’s then head of UK marketing, Chris Hawken, as the man who fought their corner with the European bosses. “Chris was really behind the campaign, but he had to champion it because the European guys were shaking their heads saying, ‘what do you mean, we’ve been a laughing stock? How dare you?’ So it was a tricky sell, but luckily we had Chris – who was great.”

Cutting through the prejudiuce

The 2001 figures told two different stories. It was the manufacturer’s biggest-ever year in the UK, with around 35,000 cars sold (11,000 Fabias by the end of 2000), yet research showed that while the public generally acknowledged that Škodas were well-built, most insisted they would never consider buying one.

The following few years saw Škoda gradually wear down the prejudice, as sales climbed and opinions changed, thanks to the continued improvements to its range and its successful relationship with Fallon. By 2005 the previously unimaginable had happened and, for the first time in the UK, Škoda had a waiting list. That year’s TV spot for the Octavia 4x4 was Gymnast, which showed a stunning floor routine completed by a rotund gymnast to rapturous applause. The endline was, ‘big and agile. Don’t see that very often.’ The following year came Giggle, which was created and directed by McLeod. Real people’s giggles and squeals of delight provided the soundtrack to its footage from the production line at a Škoda factory. It was rounded off with another great endline, ‘Manufacturer of happy drivers’, which pointed to the research Škoda had conducted, revealing 98 per cent of their drivers would recommend the brand.

Cake, a perfect creative mix

On their first day as creatives at Fallon, Chris Bovill and John Allison (now creative directors) walked through the doors and straight into a meeting with then creative director (now ECD) Richard Flintham. “We all shook hands and he said, ‘here’s your Škoda brief’,” says Bovill, who remembers the expectation that the account brought. “The Honest campaign – which I still think is amazing – came out when John and I first started in advertising and I was blown away by it. They set the bar really high and followed it up with more great ads like Gymnast, so we felt like we had to do something special to live up to the brand.”

They came up with Cake – a daring TV spot helmed by Chris Palmer that showed a team building a Fabia from various types of cake and sweet treats. It was shot over four days, cost around £500,000, and the entire project could have literally fallen to pieces at any second. “That was why it was amazing. We hadn’t tested anything. It was all theory,” says Bovill. “We were working with amazing people like the Queen’s top icer and great production people who understand cake and what you can do with it. We needed loads of Madeira sponge for the base because it has the right density to hold the weight, but no one could make it in time. We found a lady who’d lost her job and started a little cake company, but it wasn’t doing very well. She made the sponge for us in time and off the back of the ad she started selling Madeira sponge and it turned her business around.”

But hindsight allows for fond memories and at the time he, Allison, Flintham and two clients were all on set, getting their hands ‘dirty’ by helping with the building. “The clients were equally as scared and excited as us. One of them, Mary, was fantastic, but every now and then you’d look at her and she’d just be sitting there, bright red, rubbing her forehead. We had no contingency plan at all – if it had fallen down, I don’t know what we would have done and the client was fully aware of that.”

The ad was a huge success and Škoda’s current head of marketing, Heidi Cartledge, looks back on it fondly. “It was an iconic ad that cut through and was a real landmark for the brand.” 

Keeping up appearances

In 2009 Škoda entered the Intercontinental Rally Challenge for the first time, using the Fabia S2000. The team won three rallies and were runners-up in the drivers and manufacturers championships. In 2010 they won seven rallies and clinched both championships. It’s incredible exposure for the new kids on the block and the brand’s awareness is about to be boosted further, says Cartledge. “We’ve just broken through two per cent market share in the UK – that might not sound much, but it’s a bit of a magic number in the car market, as it’s the point at which people start to notice our cars appearing more commonly on the roads.”

Škoda’s courage and long-standing relationship with Fallon are key to the way the brand has turned itself around, says Bovill. “There is that trust there. We’ve become one team. It’s not like we scurry away with our ideas and then force them into it. We understand what they want, that they’ve got to sell the cars, but they understand that we’re going to keep scaring and pushing them. If it doesn’t scare them then it’s not the right idea. They like that though.”

Bovill also says that Škoda understands the need to have a conversation with drivers through interactive campaigns, like the Facebook app that accompanied the recent Mean Green TV spot. It analyses your Facebook profile, checking whether you’re in the habit of adding or removing friends, writing nice things or mean things, and then determines whether or not you are a mean person. Just like the commercial, it was the right balance of darkness and tongue-in-cheek humour.

As well as the Mean Green commercial, so far this year Škoda has also refreshed its logo and released a series of idents sponsoring ‘Crime on Five’ (the UK’s collection of crime shows on Channel Five including the CSI franchise) in April. The Puzzle idents contain clues to the location of a winnable car, starting off at a level of extreme difficultly and becoming easier as it goes on. Extra help is available on Facebook and Twitter and in July, the most skilled of the would-be detectives will crack the code to the car’s location and drive it away. 

No laughing matter

And, there’s more to come, says Cartledge, with two new models due to launch in the next three years. “We’ll be increasing our marketing spend and investing in our brand image. Awards help a lot, and we’re winning a lot of them, but advertising also has a very big role to play. When we started out, we were dealing with negative perceptions about the brand. Now that those perceptions have changed, it’s time to stop telling people what we’re not and start telling them what we are.” 

Bovill predicts that more digital work will likely form a large part of where the brand goes from here. “We’re only ever going to share things that scare them. They know that we’ve set a precedent with Cake and Mean Green. We need to keep pushing the brand message into other media, other worlds. But they want to be doing the brave stuff – that’s what its branding is all about.”

Perhaps McLeod sums up how far the Škoda brand has come when he says, “It would now be a very old-fashioned point of view to be standing in the pub talking about Škodas being skips these days. It doesn’t feel part of the zeitgeist anymore.” It seems that if you find yourself poking fun at Škoda, the joke is actually on you.