Today is the press day at the Frankfurt Motor Show – where Honda has unveiled its brand new Civic to the assembled throng.  To support this, Wieden + Kennedy has designed the concept for this year's stand: ‘Many Roads To Zero Emissions’. 

The new Civic is Honda’s next step in their long-standing commitment to being "a company that society wants to exist".  Their aim is to be a business that does not cause any harm to the environment: their ultimate goal is for all their engineering to cause zero emissions.  The new Civic is just one of the brand’s many ‘roads’ towards this goal – and the stand itself, at the most famous and biggest motor show in the world, is a chance to showcase all the innovative and visionary things Honda is doing to realise its dream.  It is also an opportunity for the million people who attend the show to spend time with the Honda brand and to experience the innovative and interesting nature of its products and technologies. 

We have collaborated with Belgian designer Sebastien Wierinck, who has created a visual representation of the roads to zero emissions for the motor show.  Sebastien has designed everything from domestic furniture to commercial interior design to installations for public spaces, galleries and art festivals.  He specialises in tubes, which he manipulates to create wonderful environments and furniture – a form of engineering and connectivity in its own right. 

For the Honda stand, he has created a series of pipes which are connected to one of the focal points: ‘The Dream House’ – a place where all of today’s technologies come together under one roof to help reduce emissions in every aspect of our lives. Sebastien has used flexible polyethylene tubes which he has manipulated to represent the fact that everything Honda does and makes is connected.  The stand is divided into sections – Hydrogen, Electric, Hybrid, Petrol and Diesel. Each technology has been colour-coded and housed in a halo of tubes which integrate together to create Honda’s future vision: The Honda Dream House.  The stand focuses on the world premiere of the new Civic and supports its launch to the global motoring press and almost one million show goers.

Photography – Julien Buckley

Creatives Tom and David said, ‘We wanted to talk about Honda’s technology in a simple way and used the tubes to help tell the story. Each technology area was given a specific colour so that at a glance people would know that Honda has lots of different technologies in lots of different products. And each colour had a good reason, for example there are blue tubes in the Hydrogen area because the only thing that the FCX Clarity (a hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle) emits is water. And the multi-coloured Dream House combines all the colours as it represents all the technologies coming together to create Honda’s vision of zero emissions’.

And Tony D: ‘Like Honda, Wieden + Kennedy is always looking to do things that haven't been done before.  Some clients pigeon-hole their agencies, but we were given the chance to prove ourselves in an area we are not well known for. To execute Honda's Motor Show stand so that it reflects their brand values was an opportunity we didn't want to miss.’ 

We have also created a pan-European marketing campaign to support the unveiling of the new Civic which will break in three phases between now and January 2012. The campaign will relate the story of the Honda engineers, how they got to final design of the Civic, and the lessons learned along the way.

The first phase begins online with the launch of a destination hub on YouTube www.youtube.com/hondacivicUK This is the heart of our forthcoming ‘The Great Unknown’ campaign.