Marketing lIve 2012 gives visitors the chance to see the
latest marketing solutions, to find out what’s new, benchmark and work out how to turn
ideas to their competitive advantage.
Wednesday morning’s session on the centre stage of the
Marketing Live had a brilliant case study from Chris Taylor, European marketing
Communications for Lexus in Europe on marketing a luxury brand.
 |
| Chris Taylor , Lexus |
Lexus is the luxury brand of Toyota. In 1989 Eiji Toyoda set
the vision for the company to ‘ create the finest luxury car in the world.’
Well it took a huge
number of talented people to bring this all to fruition.
1400 engineers, 3,600
technicians 450 prototypes and continual testing but the foundation of the
brand Lexus is (was) the relentless
pursuit of perfection.
Lexus sell around 44,000 vehicles in Europe. 200,000 in USA.
Lexus’ differentiators against the massive three German brands of BMW Mercedes and Audi is a pioneering drive in both technology and innovation evidenced by the Hybrid Drive and superb customer service as evidenced in countless awards gained in the USA and UK.
Lexus have now have a new brand expression to live up to
“ Create Amazing”
But that is too good for Lexus alone.
Shouldn’t we all in Sales and Marketing not strive each day to ‘create amazing’ for our clients?
Lexus have now refocused their brand image to be more dynamic through great photography, the bolder use of colour and chunkier typography.
This reflects their increased confidence when competing with the three giant German manufacturers.
Chris outlined the Lexus Brand Strategy and Brand Expression but then moved into his exposition on the development and launch of the new Lexus website.
He describes web marketing within Lexus is seen to be a game changer.
Visits to 4 or more dealers is typical 27% of such customers at the moment. The figure was 47% just five years ago.
The creation of a coordinated but culturally flexible website across the 42 company websites across Europe for the Lexus group is a huge project.
The budget concerned is what most of us could only dream of. Yet Chris’ case study gave very useful tips that even the most modest business could learn.
Starting with the vision of what success would look like and how it could be reached ,the relevant KPIs were set.
The next step was thorough research analysis both through direct primary approaches and desk research.
Lexus then took considerable care to study their Audience through deep audience Insight analysis their digital behaviour and also noting the regional differences.
Then Lexus moved to a more recognisable approach of Gap analysis to then contemplating how to sell the vision and produce the road map from which the design was then conceived, designed and built.
The keys learning that Lexus case shared with us are:
· The web is key so make the journey to purchase less of a strain for the customer Lexus thought
· Competitors had a very homogenous look. Lexus chose to differentiate the look of their website.
· Get outside your market and look at similar brands in different markets. So as a Luxury brand Lexus looked to Chanel, Burberry and Rolex for ideas. Their Learning was pretty much “ less is definitely more.”
· Today the consumer wants more. Their research revealed that content and functionality was not being provided as the customer wanted.
Chris emphasised the basic but very important point that the website should not declare what the brand wants to hear but rather give easy access to what the consumer wants to know.
Some of the Lexus KPIs are easy to relate/adapt to every business.
We all have the equivalent of how long do the customers stay on our site, pull through figures the equivalent to visits to dealerships, to taking a test drive to ordering brochures to asking for financial quotes.
Lexus are shortly to launch their mobile offering. One of the clever thoughts that Chris shared with the audience was that when designing mobile Lexus use ‘progressing enhancement’. Rather than the conventional approach of condensing and stripping, The content from the website Lexus chose to develop and work it up in the opposite direction.
At first when I saw the demonstration of the main website it looked very long but this was seen to be better than clicking away to different pages. In a sense, it looks like the software does the adapting as you scroll down the page. For example when a client’s selects say a colour of a model as they scroll down the page for other information the illustration all become the colour selected. Until Chris pointed it out in the demonstration I had not realised it. It was so subtle and clever.
The visitor to the website can control how the journey will look by selecting a magazine look, or elct an entirely image rich format or a more interactive format like colouring the picture of the car.
Apparently, web visitors do tend to anchor so by making the longer picture on their anchorage page they stick with experience.
All this type of thinking emanates fro the principles of KAIZEN . To create amazing optimisation is a continual task.
Does this all work?
Well Chris finished with these impressive results for the UK website after just 3 weeks
Results:
75% decrease in bounce rate (visitors leaving the site)
100% increase in visitor duration
40 times more viewing on critical pages such as Price and Specifics
70% increase in Dealer location pages.
Good luck with your striving to “Create amazing” !
The show’s guide – Little Black Book is a manageable A5 type size reasonably easy to navigate around considering the enormously wide offering of the show.
There are three extra ‘zones’ or Show areas this year Customer Loyalty and Motivation, Promotional Merchandise and Live Marketing.
The show is on two levels and is big and busy.
Marketing Week Live offers incredible wide range educational
content aimed at career advancement, bringing current thought leaders and
influencers , to deliver insight and expertise from global brands.
I am visiting to gain a deeper understanding, learn and take
away some tangible inspirations from the campaign success stories of the likes
of Coca Cola , Nexus and Diageo etc. and
apply them to my business with clients.
I am also looking
around the exhibition areas on the two levels of the grand Hall, Olympia London
to find the tools to become a little bit smarter, after all we are all trying to generate better ROI.
The show is divided into 8 areas
1.
In store
2.
Insight
3.
Data marketing
4.
In store
5.
Customer loyalty and motivation
6.
On line marketing
7.
Promotional merchandise
8.
LIVE
Fantastic buzz at the show -
No comments:
Post a Comment