Flock Automotive Marketing Forum

At the recent Flock Automotive Marketing Forum, held at the Sartoria restaurant in London’s West End, senior automotive and transport executives found they all shared similar challenges and opportunities of becoming a data-led marketing organisation; mainly, they agreed on the need to design their marketing organisations and ways of working around the needs of their customers.

The attendees identified 5 key barriers to becoming a customer-centric and customer-connected organisation:

1. The culture must shift for the existing players as they move from “hardware” to “software” businesses, and an understanding that they are mobility business, and must compete on new topics, with new features, for new consumers. There was a lively discussion around whether the data in a new car is its most valuable asset!
2. A new vision for automotive marketing and a new sense of “what good looks like”. In an age of the “connected content experience”, many manufacturers are still dominated by a TV centric approach with PR siloed, and digital a bolt on.
3. Most brands are having to deal with a legacy of old and siloed internal structures and slow ways of working, and are vulnerable to the agile digital born tech-challengers who work faster, more efficiently and learn quicker.

• There is a lot of marketing data collected but the knowledge of what to do with it and how to use it for efficient decision making in marketing organisations is missing.
• An Agency model that needs to change, as many agencies are acting in self-interest and/or lacking joined up capabilities.

Here are key questions for marketers to consider:

1. Do you have the right teams, structured in the right way to deliver this shift in connected consumer experiences? Have you considered a marketing capabilities assessment?
2. Are you able to connect with consumers in an meaningful way at the right time and place? Does your data and technology facilitate this?
3. Do you have an agile process in place, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, to allow your teams to work in a collaborative and efficient way?
4. Personalised messaging data, based on a user’s journey, needs to be brought together and managed alongside customer data – do you have the right technology in place to do so?
5. With the change in consumer behaviour, have you thought about how you would structure and contract for the most efficient agency ecosystem?
6. Do you have a connected remuneration model across your ecosystem that drives your business targets but rewards for innovation and performance?

If you’d like to know more about our work with leading automotive brands or our core marketing transformation disciplines, then please give us a call, or come to next the lunch.