When it comes to experiential marketing, the automobile sector is among the top categories that needs no convincing of its impact on the consumer. A car is a milestone investment in the average person’s life and marketers realize that a good product experience can prompt a customer to frantically reach for his chequebook.
Although Ford has been relatively controlled with its experiential efforts, the brand admits the importance of delivering personalized experiences and keeps an eye out for “original and practical” ideas. Coinciding with the launch of the new Ford Figo,
Anurag Mehrotra, Executive Director- Marketing, Sales & Service, Ford India, goes off-roading down experiential-ville
What is Ford’s marketing mix?
30-35% is TV, 35-35% is towards print media, 15-20% is digital and the rest is towards radio and out of home.
What about experiential?
An interesting thing we do at Ford is we create a ford dealer advertising fund where we along with dealers contribute a certain amount of money to create a common pool of fund which is used for experiential marketing. In percentage terms that will be about 5-10% of the entire marketing spends.
The new Figo is equipped with a lot of technological features. Don't you think technology needs to be experienced to be understood?
Yes you are absolutely right. So one of the things about Ford cars so not just the technology but also the drive dynamics that is subset of technology. It is best felt when you drive the car. Therefore at ford dealerships we insist a lot on test-drives. Once a customer walks in our zone managers make sure that he doesn’t leave the dealership without a test drive and that’s when we get a chance to talk and demonstrate these features on the product.
But for that a customer has to come to a ford store. How do you entice customers?
Yes he has to. To entice customers to visit one of our dealerships we have created ‘video snacks’ where the features are explained in simple terms. Consumers themselves create these videos because they are able to explain it in a far simpler manner. Potential customers get it conceptually and they think they should check it out and experience it for themselves. Now with easy access to internet, videos are the way to go.
Experiential is exploding across industries. What are some of the experiential initiatives taken by Ford?
When we launched Ford Fiesta in U.S, we transported 100 Fiestas from Europe and asked 100 customers to drive the car and tell the world what they have experienced.
We did something very similar in India when we launched Eco Sport. The campaign was called Urban Discovery and its intent was to encourage people to get into the car, get somewhere and live life. It can be just going to Chandni Chowk or to Qutub Minar early in the morning, basically doing small things that make you get back into ‘living’.
As part of the Urban Discovery campaign we gave about 40-50 odd people the Eco-Sport to drive. As a manufacturer you are very nervous to give a product to anyone before it is launched. But we still gave the cars away and allowed customers to report whatever they truly felt about the car. It speaks of confidence in one way but it makes marketers and agency very nervous because you don’t know what is going to come out.
The key here is that you have to be very confident of your product and should be able to take punches on your chin when they come through. We have done these campaigns for Eco- Sport, Fiesta and Aspire and we think it has worked brilliantly.
Immersive experiences are memorable. Most cars in India have a deity’s statue on the dashboard. When a car returns after a servicing job from a Ford dealership we place two flowers on the feet of the statue. Just this small gesture has proven to leave such a great impression with our customers.
Are there any challenges you encounter when delivering an experience in India?
In India every city is different. Delhi has a population of 16-18 million people. Just South Delhi has a population of 2.4 million. So, if we have to do a community based experiential program here it is that much tougher. Just the scale and the heterogeneity of the market is challenging. The only aggregators you have is social media which you can use to create a homogeneous set and then you curate experiential campaigns for them.
Ford has 7 million people on its Facebook page but that does not mean they have the same interests. We have to find those smaller groups and create personalized experiences. I remember when I first opened a bank account I was given a predefined account number, but now banks ask you to choose your preferred account number, credit cards today allow you to have photos, banking can happen over phone apps, so the trend is of creating personalized experiences and that is where we need to put our efforts.
What is Ford’s long-term experiential strategy in India?
You have to become enablers of experiences today. So you have to find homogenous sets of people with common interests and see how you can become an enabler for them. You cannot charm them with product push because it’s all about the experience today.
(The article first appeared in the Oct-Nov '15 issue of BW APPLAUSE)
