Automotive-Industry Experience
I have worked for four Car companies, all of which have distribution networks and manufacturing capacity within the UK.
My experience has been gained in:
- Control Structures: defining the operating environments for agencies and countries, relative to European HQs
- Marketing and Brand Management: relationships between Europe and the countries
‘Dialogue Marketing’ is the preserve of high-price, infrequently purchased items items, like cars. But the multi-wave campaigns are expensive and a bit like an oil-tanker: hard to manoeuvre quickly.
I worked as my customer’s envoy within its advertising agency to ensure that efficiencies were realised and campaign effectiveness was demonstrated — or not. With large campaigns, it is possible to define groups of ‘treated’ and ‘untreated’ prospects and suspects such that meaningful return-on-investment figures can be produced.
I worked with one manufacturer in establishing its relationship with its advertising agencies.
Whilst the agency was able to offer a pan-European ‘product’, the Car company’s model allowed too much autonomy to the countries, meaning that the economies of scale that should have been being exploited were lost.
Worse, each quasi-autonomous country:
- Lacked central guidance
- Lacked a best-practice model
- Accommodated arcane and inefficient local rules
- Did ‘what it had always done’
The challenge here was to deliver best practice, by taking the best from each of the models, whilst allowing for some necessary local aberrations, where historical or legal reasons meant they actually made sense.
Here, I worked for the European Marketing Director, working on both developing and communicating the new strategy. Briefly, that:
- Developed a best-practice model
- Tested local deviation against that
- Accommodated or rejected local rules
- Ensured economies of scale were maximised
And, most importantly:
- Put my customer — not its advertising agency —
in the driving seat
To Centralise or Devolve ?
An earlier piece of work for another manufacturer had me again working right across Europe on a different manifestation of the same problem, put simply:
- What’s done centrally ?
- What’s devolved to the countries ?
As part of a major relaunch and repositioning of the brand, the company sought to regain control of local marketing, and needed to develop a model that was flexible enough to accommodate the needs of single-showroom retailers as well as pan-European multi-marque retailers such as Cowie-Arriva.
The company was also responding to the end of EU block exemption: the anti-competitive agreement that allowed for tied dealerships.
Working with this customer and its European advertising agency, I commissioned and analysed research in the seven largest European markets, gaining significant insight as I did so into:
- National buying characteristics
- Receptiveness to different communication ‘channels’
- The pitfalls of translating studies into other languages...
A learning point for me was not to allow the market researchers too much free rein.
When we looked at preferred channels across Europe, we saw the uptake of ‘kiosks’ — the multi-media self-service units you see increasingly at places like airports — pretty-much as we expected: higher as you move north through Europe.
But one anomaly — France — stood out, and it showed the danger of taking raw data at face value.
In the case of the French survey, the word ‘kiosk’ had been translated as ‘cabine’ ... which sort-of makes sense until you realise that this word is actually French for ‘phone box’. This, of course, made it impossible to draw conclusions from asking, effectively, two entirely different questions of different linguistic groups. But we only found that out after the study had reported.
Elsewhere, successes in this project allowed my customer to:
- Protect and promote the brand
- Define lines of control from Europe to the countries
- Hugely increase the effectiveness of national advertising spend
- Enhance the relationship of the centre with the countries
Where the mantra was to move
- “From Censure to Support”
... which we manifestly did.