Volkswagen: 
Website Technology for Brand Repositioning

The Challenge

Volkswagen of America, the world’s third largest car manufacturer, was repositioning its brand identity to expand their market presence and reach its celebrated enthusiast community. Volkswagen’s agency of record, Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B), envisioned a more interactive and engaging user experience that strongly reflected the brand’s personality. The VW team had several major goals for the new website - greater flexibility for marketing, reduced IT overhead and faster time to market with content updates. To coincide with the overall repositioning campaign, the website needed to be built in three months, which led to the first major obstacle: VW & CP+B weren’t sure that their ideal technical solution could be implemented within the scheduled timeframe. CP+B recommended Oshyn, Inc. based on its track record of rapid development success and proven technical expertise with similar clients.





The Solution

Oshyn developed a proof-of-concept microsite to demonstrate their capabilities and prove that VW’s envisioned technology solution could in fact be developed and delivered in the required time frame. Oshyn then rapidly developed and upgraded multiple applications (Find a Dealer, Get a Quote, Schedule a Test Drive, VW Club and Maintenance) using an Agile development process to ensure that the functionality met the needs of all stakeholders. The integration of these systems required complex data migration, for which Oshyn used its proprietary designed migration scripts that reduce the possibility of creating bugs while concurrently speeding up the data migration process. Oshyn migrated Volkswagen’s Oracle database and Websphere application server to the open source MySQL database and JBoss server.

The Results

Oshyn met the target completion date; completely redesigning the back-end structure of the website and redeploying vw.com in less than 3 months. Volkswagen’s website had experienced issues with duplicate or lost web requests, which Oshyn resolved through integration of back-end applications with Volkswagen’s existing IT infrastructure, making the user’s buying process, flawless from start to finish. By migrating to an open source database and open source application server, the goals of reduced expenses and increased flexibility were delivered. Oshyn implemented extensive security measures to ensure the website would be resistant to hackers. The new design gave the vw.com website a more appealing user experience with a more intuitive path to product information from a visitor’s first interaction with the brand on the homepage to their scheduled test drive. The website won a Favorite Web Award with judges saying that, “the search-based site finds common ground between the highly informative stats, buying information, comparisons and the interactive marketing spaces typically treated as one-off microsite.” Following the success of vw.com, Oshyn has continued to work on several Volkswagen initiatives.

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