Part III

The automobile industry is moving very aggressively towards targeted marketing and relying on creating the right brand experience for their customers.

One has only to visit a car manufacturer's showrooms to realise that it is no longer just that. It has more to do with projecting the brand and everything connected to it. From floor tiles to furnishings and graphics, from uniforms to the sales pitch, there is an effort to connect the brand with the walk-in customer. The product follows the brand and the brand delivers on the promise. And that is the experience, or in many cases the start of the brand experience.

How do you decide which SUV to buy? Frankly, one hardly gets to feel what an SUV is all about, unless you drive it on the terrain it is meant to be driven on. So what does one do to create an experience for their target customers? Creating artificial tracks in large open spaces within a city, inviting 200 target customers to the venue over a Saturday/Sunday, having specialist drivers actually demonstrate the capabilities of the car to the passengers seated with him. One car manufacturer has seen a 25-30 per cent increase in bookings in the cities where they have done this exercise.

Another automobile company hosts an exclusive event in the deserts of Rajasthan every year. Invitees are selected with care and the entire event is built around giving the select invitees a desert driving experience that they would treasure for a long time. It's not about selling their cars. It's about connecting with their brand!

Media test drives of new cars have also become about the experience but with a difference, thanks to glossy magazines, TV shows, Internet, Facebook and Twitter. Here, the target customers are reading or viewing specialists' reports about the test drives of different cars, in the words of the journalists who have driven them across various terrains, thereby affording the reader/buyer a more informed opinion about every car that might be on his/her shopping list. The prospective buyer is experiencing the vehicle through the experience of a trusted source, the journalist.

As we progress, an increasing number of automobile companies will be looking to create such special experiences for their customers. Every car segment can and should have its own experiential marketing options, whereby the company can narrow down the set of customers to whom they can hard sell their cars through such targeted experiential marketing tactics.

Similarly, other industry segments that rely heavily on conventions and jamborees to communicate with their target customer base need to realise that they can create differentiation vis-à-vis their competitors by thinking out of the box. Break out of the conventional conference and jamboree syndrome.

With the mushrooming of marketing and communication avenues from print and TV to on-ground and web-based platforms, it is a challenge for present day marketers to decide which way to go and what resources to allocate to which platform.

Do our automobile marketers and agencies have the bandwidth to take on the challenge? Marketers have the advantage of downloading some fantastic experiential marketing concepts from their global counterparts and trying to execute them in India. That's the easy bit. The difficult part is how you localise such global tactics to suit the tastes of your Indian customers whilst also taking care of elements like safety and other things that match global standards.

From personal experience, I will have to be brutally honest in saying that most of our agencies have not yet developed the right skill sets and expertise to execute many of the projects which the automobile companies are trying to bring in. Paying lip service and convincing the corporate marketing boss that we have done xyz shows and we can do this will not work, increasingly.

First, let me differentiate between events. Putting together a film star night or event does require a fair amount of logistical and managerial skills. But from a die-hard motorsports fan's perspective (mine), those skills are redundant when trying to put together an F1 road show or a ten-car, ten-day Delhi-Khardungla-Delhi expedition. This requires a very different set of skills and understanding, and such projects are vastly and unimaginably more intricate and difficult to put together than run of the mill shows.

For example, the five hour, November 2008 F1 Road show on the Rajpath, executed without a hitch v/s a similar road show executed in 2009 in Mumbai which went kaput in about four minutes. The blame lies with a whole bunch of people within the companies and with agencies who don't understand what is required to put on such a show, and there's a whole story of incompetence in there.

But experience as a means of connecting a brand and its products with customers are here to stay. The faster we build our expertise in it the better, and as we go along, I can see that experiential marketing will be getting an increasingly larger slice of the marketing spend in most companies.

(This is the final part in the three-part series of Ashish Sinharoy's article.)