Johnny Virker
Johnny Virker is a unique book series developed for children by Per-Kristian Lundefaret, Øyvind Sauvik (Vinnie) and Ole-Martin Lundefaret. The book focused on promoting healthy values to kids and youth with topics like traffic-safety, anti-bullying, and other community-related challenges. The uniqueness of the series is that it uses characters from different collaborators such as Mini-Norway (Johnny-works), Felleskjøpet (Lawnmower), LTN (Selius), Nasta(Hitachoo), Automester, and others. The idea behind this was to collectively create something that would stand for ethical values and fun activities for the young, and at the same time be an excellent branding opportunity for the organizations involved in the project.
The launching of the first book was at Oslo Motor Show in 2014, where we created a universe consisting of real physical characters from the book, activities for kids such as readings from the book, tire-changing, lawn mower races and more. As well as being an external anchor to the customers, the book and characters became an internal anchoring for the organizations by involving the collaborators to be a part of the process of creating something different and fun. The after effects of this project has been tremendous and opened up for many new collaborators willing to join in on the project. The book has sold over 40 000 examples, and at the most, we met almost 300 000 thousand people a year doing different events and book signings around Norway with our collaborators.