How a Leading Global Auto Maker is Building One Platform to Fuel Customer-Centricity

The automotive industry is facing disruption on multiple fronts. Customer expectations of brands has changed as have their expectations for vehicle ownership. Amidst this environment, this leading global auto maker aims for one in every 12 utility vehicles sold globally to be one of their brands by 2020. To meet this goal, we designed and prototyped the blueprint for a global platform at scale to drive a data-driven customer experience across all touchpoints to generate demand and increase sales.

The global platform facilitates the breakdown of siloes, leverages data and technology, drives accountability and enables teams along the entire sales funnel to react more quickly to buyer demands by arming them with real-time metrics and dashboards. We applied a reverse funnel approach, meaning we worked backwards, starting with the bottom of the funnel (a purchased vehicle), to predict the required media spend for an outcome-oriented model that resulted in significant efficiency gains. The platform was launched in two representative markets as a pilot, but once scaled globally, will allow global teams to roll out similar models within their local regions.

More specifically, to better understand and improve how marketing and sales contributed to overall sales, the auto maker decided to take a closer look at the sales funnel and marketing campaigns.

Demand model: A predictive sales funnel

The auto maker needed to predict the effectiveness of their sales funnel at each stage of the buyer journey, the current and future state of the business and the effect of direct and indirect factors on sales. We built advanced machine learning models to:

Dynamic creative: Personalized marketing campaigns

The auto maker needed to get into market faster and optimize creative along the way. We streamlined processes and collaboration, resulting in a reduction of the campaign workflow from campaign brief to go-live by 50% despite the richness of campaign variants and the added complexity of personalization. In Addition the insights-based campaigns and created targeted personas have driven efficiencies in:

The platform is not just a technology solution -- it presents a holistic approach to marketing and sales across people, process and technology. The auto maker is now able to optimize media and incentive spend together across the entire sales funnel, beyond just lead generation, to get an accurate prediction of business outcomes and recommendations on how to improve them.