Our client was a luxury auto maker that boasted supreme quality of European cars while retaining certain distinctive brand characteristics. However, around 2014, while competitors were expanding their market share in eastern China, the most important luxury car market in China, our client’s growth lagged behind.
After interviewing over 400 luxury car owners and having in-depth discussions with dozens of automotive dealers, Illuminera identified the reasons for its disappointing performance: in face of fierce competition, the client did not narrow down to the right target consumer segments, and failed to build strong brand awareness or craft an appealing brand message that enticed consumer desire while distancing itself from the main competitors.
Drawing the need spectrum and pinpoint the core consumer target groups
To fix the problem, Illuminera and the client marketing team banded together to explore the spectrum of needs that drove the luxury car brand choice. With the resulted needs spectrum, it became self-evident that the client had no chance in the bulk of the need spectrum since these needs were tightly grasped by the main competitors and did not match with client’s brand heritage.
Yet in another part of the spectrum we identified the needs that could be best fulfilled by our client. In fact, consumers falling under this part of spectrum already disproportionally identified themselves with our brand, just that we had never invested heavily and precisely to build brand awareness and image among these consumer groups. While these consumer groups made up only a minority of the luxury car market, it was in reality already a sizable market. More critically the client had better chance to win a relatively large market share within these groups.
Reshaping the brand strategy
With the consumer target groups determined, the team then turned to devise a powerful brand value proposition that could fulfill consumer’s needs including those generally existed in the luxury segment and those unique to the specific consumer groups. In the end, a new brand positioning strategy was tested and accepted by the client. To ensure the successful implementation of the new positioning, the team also delivered full brand architecture, media and event plans, as well as tactical recommendations on demand generation.
Thanks to another brand strategy firmly based on consumer centricity and creativity, the client enjoyed renewed growth in the subsequent years.
In
the automotive industry where dealers are the key players, how to effectively
implement abstract strategic issues has been always been a tough problem. With
the joint efforts of our client, we divided the overall brand strategy into
different tactical modules, including media access, marketing events,
cross-border cooperation, and so on, to ensure the new brand strategy can be
executed on different levels.
Through these efforts, Illuminera successfully helped the brand establish a
core audience and quantify the corresponding sales expectations, not only
reshaped the "value" of the brand but also led to its outstanding
sales performance in 2014.
