"Shouldn't we be offering this on our site too?" - Marketing Is Commerce, Commerce Is Marketing

Excerpts from "Converge: Transforming Business at the Intersection of Marketing and Technology" by Bob W. Lord and Ray Velez.

Chapter 5

London’s Piccadilly is both the best and the worst kind of environment to try to sell luxury cars. Slicing through some upscale neighborhoods, the wide boulevard is highly trafficked by sophisticated, discerning, and affluent urban dwellers—exactly the kind of buyer that a luxury automaker is looking for. But this is London, so real estate comes at a premium, meaning that a sprawling showroom big enough to show off all of an automaker’s models and derivatives probably isn’t in the cards. Most don’t bother to try and settle for installing showrooms in out-of-the-way parts of the city or even outside it.

Audi, however, decided to crack the code. Last year, just before the Summer Olympics, the company opened a revolutionary new showroom in Piccadilly. Audi City, designed by our Emerging Experiences Lab, takes prospective buyers through the range of possibilities by using immersive technology. Only Audi’s halo cars are present in the showroom, but by using this technology a shopper can look at every model, derivative, color, and specification and virtually experience the customized car they’re seeking.

Using multitouch displays, the buyer configures his or her dream ride from millions of combinations, visualizing it with photorealistic three-dimensional technology. To experience it, the shopper “tosses” the image onto a floor-to-ceiling power wall, where that dream car stands before him in life-size scale. Then the shopper can gesture to interact with the car, using Kinect technology to explore every angle.

There’s also a tactile portion of the experience. After the car has been visualized, it’s time to feel different materials, such as the upholstery. Indeed, many physical bits of the car are RFID-tagged so they can be applied to the configurator. And because Audi knows the purchase process doesn’t necessarily begin and end in the showroom, the car shopper can take home a USB stick with the configured car and pop it into the home computer. It’ll have the exact configuration that was made in the showroom.

Audi City is inarguably an amazing technological experience, but you’re probably wondering, is it moving metal? In just a few months since opening sales figures have increased by more than 70 percent. Cars can be ordered at the site with the customer’s local Audi dealership taking care of delivery, or they can be delivered in the Audi City handover bay. It’s worked well enough that Audi is going ahead with plans to open 20 digital showrooms in major international cities by 2015. Audi Cities will be popping up all over the world, showing that you don’t need to have the car on hand to sell it.