The Future of Individual Premium Mobility – Defining the Digital Brand and Customer Experience for Audi

As Audis lead agency for Branded Interactions we continuously worked on Audis brand personality and its digital brand experience over the course of 5 years. From Brand Personality over defining Audis role within the Volkswagen Group portfolio, to Tone-of-Voice and a multimodal vision of the in-car voice assistant, we defined a living brand personality for Audi on diverse levels and helped Audi deliver a long-term relevant and therefore successful brand experience while remaining true to the core of the brand.

With our work, we have supported Audi’s CI team on its transition from rigid brand management to a future-ready living brand approach that enables consistent yet flexible brand design.
 With the brand personality and brand filters, we defined a core control and monitoring tool that allows the CI team to define and review the behavior of the Audi brand at various touch points and within the customer lifecycle at any time.

While Audi had already defined individual customer journeys for specific products and services, it lacked a holistic concept for all touch points. Audi’s goal was therefore to map and manage the customer’s overall experience of the brand while aligning the initiatives of the various internal teams — for an individual, harmonic customer experience that inspires and sharpens the perception of Audi as a brand.

We supported Audi in the entire process of journey mapping and developed a design together, including best practices, which was to be made real in the upcoming one to two years. As a result, we created an experience kit that provides a basic track with the option to add extras at any time and tailor it to meet specific needs.

we used customer research to validate the moments of truth we had identified and to add relevant moments that had previously been neglected. To this end, we interviewed 20 people who had either just purchased an Audi or were about to do so, and talked to them about both their positive and negative experiences in the course of the purchase, use and service process.

User-centered design is more important than ever. By establishing the Customer Experience Initiative as a permanent fixture in the company, we have taken the essential steps toward true customer centricity together with Audi. The customer journey helps the various departments to identify potential for optimizing the brand experience from the customer’s point of view and to design it across departments.

Audi was early to recognize the potential of these voice assistants: In 2018, we therefore supported Audi in the fundamental strategy process for developing a brand-specific voice assistant. To this end, we gathered a multidisciplinary team of business and brand strategists, designers from various divisions, and developers. In four joint workshops, we defined the most important parameters of the voice assistant, its personality and how it affects voice, speech style, sound, behavior and screen content on the man-machine interface (MMI).

In 2019, we brought this vision to life with a finished prototype: Collaborating with the AI experts at paragon semvox and the software developers at iNTENCE, we primarily wanted to improve POI searches, i.e. those for places of interest to the user, with the help of a navigation system. We achieved this thanks to convincing, multimodal interactions based on AI algorithms. Thus, we were able to provide the perfect concierge experience that considers context and individual preferences automatically.

During the ride, interactions will primarily take place via voice in the future, so we developed dialogs, sounds, and screen content for various use cases. These scenarios ranged from querying a user’s basic preferences to active POI suggestions by the voice assistant to joint POI searches with another person. Together with a script writer, we eventually created dialogs that included the voice assistant’s personality and a range of situations. We had these recorded by a professional speaker whose voice pitch and intonation were an ideal fit for the project.

In order to include the visual as well, we also developed a concept for displaying the voice assistant in the vehicle using screen animations and ambient light.

The final result of the collective work was a true-to-detail multimodal prototype, which was piloted at an internal Audi innovation event in October 2019 and whose user experience will hopefully be experienced in series production in the near to medium future.

Brand Strategy
Brand Archetypes
Brand Experience Kit
Customer Journey Mapping
Stakeholder Workshops
Customer Research
Expert Evaluation
UX/UI Design
Design Fictions
Product Naming
Conversation Design
Audiovisual Prototyping