Looking forward to a career in marketing, I knew coming in to the UBC MBA program that I needed to focus on areas that would be most relevant to me post-graduation. I have extensive experience working in marketing for a traditional automotive company which is only just beginning to realize the benefits of an online marketing strategy. So throughout the program I’ve tried to find classes that would help me learn the basics of using technology in marketing, and even interned in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company over the summer in Vancouver to gain knowledge first-hand. So while looking at the available courses in the last period, I jumped at the chance to take eMarketing since the course summary outlined the very things I was looking for, and having just completed it I can honestly say that it did not disappoint.

Expectations

To be honest, I started this class at a very elementary level of knowledge about the subject. While I had heard a lot about tools like Hootsuite and Google Analytics, I had no working knowledge of them. The only electronic marketing that I had some understanding of were email campaigns, online presence through company websites, and company Facebook pages. So I was looking forward to learning about these topics as well as understanding how they fit into the traditional marketing methods.

 

Learning Takeaways

Looking back at the course now, I feel there were three main takeaways for me personally. The first was grasping the big picture of the course – whether it was understanding what tools to use, how they fit into a traditional marketing plan, and what resources to utilize to deepen my understanding of the subject matter.

 

The second learning takeaway was the hard skills the course taught us, especially in terms of learning how to use the individual tools that we were exposed to. Specifically, I would say Hootsuite was a complete revelation to me. While I had heard of it and the many advantages that it brought to monitoring an online presence, the fact that we were able to use it in our final project and get a chance to get certified for free was a massive bonus. In addition, some of the other technical knowledge that I found extremely useful to be exposed to was understanding how to monitor a Facebook page for a client through the in-built analytics on the site, and the many little tidbits of helpful information spread throughout the classes such as knowing that one Google + “Plus” is equal to four Facebook “Likes” in determining the visibility of a particular site on Google’s search engine algorithm.

 

And the third takeaway was in learning how to prepare an online marketing plan and implementing it for a real client. Sadly, I was not able to get the most out of this exercise since my group had an issue with our client which I will discuss below. But on the whole, understanding the steps that go into making an online marketing plan was a major personal learning takeaway for me from this course.

 

Client Project

We had originally planned on conducting an eMarketing campaign for a local area bar but due to the reluctance of the management we spoke to and the lack of time we decided on conducting a campaign for a San Francisco-based online professional network for technical professionals of the animation and motion picture industry named Zerply that one of our group members had a personal connection with. Unfortunately we faced an issue here too late in the process with our original point of contact passing over communication to another individual who was not as enthusiastic as the first and stopped us from posting on their behalf.

 

Our project thus had a number of issues that prevented us from taking advantage of this exercise. Even so, there were a number of lessons that we learnt from this experience, both in terms of the actual deliverables and the team experience. Based on our analysis, we correctly identified that Zerply was not making optimum use of certain channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Zerply’s Facebook page is very attractive but is not updated frequently causing a systematic drop in views and “likes” on its page. On the other hand, Zerply does not even have a LinkedIn page – while it is a niche professional network itself, we feel that having a page on LinkedIn would not hurt as there would be many potential users on the site that it could attract if marketed properly.

 

 

In terms of the team experience, we also faced a number of issues. We had some communication issues and this caused a lot of additional delays. In particular, my own portion of the project was preparing the content calendar. As I learnt in the class where we broke up into groups based on our portions of the project, other content calendar makers faced some of the same issues that I did, and we all agreed on lack of teamwork and communication being the single biggest drawback of preparing one. Since the content calendar is the first step of the project, it requires the entire team to be on the same page and to contribute their thoughts on when certain actions need to be taken. Unfortunately this was not the case in our group and I feel that this affected the project moving forward.

 

Conclusion

On the whole, I have mixed feelings about the course. While I gained an incredible amount of knowledge that I’m sure will help me in my career, the issues we faced in our group project and the short duration of the course did not allow me to fully utilize it as a practical tool to implement that knowledge. But other than the issues we faced in our final project, taking this course was a great decision and I look forward to using my new-found knowledge in the real world.

 

 

 

Trips to local car dealers, conversations with friends and family, reading up on Car and Driver and Consumer Reports – these were the traditional ways of deciding what new car to buy. But based on recent studies, new car buyers are focusing more on online communities, made-for-YouTube advertisements, and “build-a-car” features on manufacturer websites to decide what to buy.

 

Changing consumer habits, especially with regards to technology and its usage, are having major implications for businesses of all kinds. While the majority of the news reported regarding these implications is reported in relation to more high-tech industries, there are profound changes happening in the more traditional products and services industries as well that are not as widely reported. And a great example of this is the automotive industry, which has changed the way it markets itself with the increasing use of technology among its target audience.

 

Having worked in the automotive industry in a marketing capacity for more than seven years, I have seen these changes first-hand as well as been a part of them, and they have been fascinating to say the least. According to an insight paper by McKinsey & Company, automotive companies were surprisingly among the first to use online media as a platform for car sales, with automobile configurators becoming a popular feature on their websites early on. But the majority of them have not kept up with consumer habits in recent years and very few have added any other eMarketing features apart from refined versions of online configurators.

Brabus Online Configurator

 

The McKinesy report also talks about eight key trends shaping digital marketing in the automotive industry, such as digital experience counting as the second most important consumer touchpoint after live experience in determining consumers’ willingness to pay. Other trends are digital media becoming an important part of the “purchasing journey” for consumers, the positive corollary between integrating online and offline marketing campaigns to consumer brand perceptions, and digital products enhancing brand loyalty (hence the move to integrate new technologies such as mobile devices to car music systems based on online feedback).

 

In addition, the report talks about how digital communities are influencing purchase decisions, with many traditional purchase influencers such as Car and Driver and Consumer Reports magazines moving forums online and becoming major platforms of community discussion. Having been part of the industry, I can relate to a lot of these points, especially the ones related to consumers forming perceptions of brands from online marketing and community forums in particular. Even so, many manufacturers, especially the larger and older brands, still spend the majority of their advertising budgets on traditional marketing areas such as print and television advertising.

 

A major reason for this slow response to adapting all forms of digital media is the way many manufacturers are managed. Many of the traditional brands have senior management that has been brought up in the traditional school of automotive marketing thought that undervalues the impact of digital marketing. For example, one major argument that manufacturers give for not embracing electronic marketing wholeheartedly is that the majority of digital media influenced car sales are in the secondary, or used, car market, and not in the primary market for new users where test drives are preferred in the purchasing process. While this is true, it should also be noted that test drives come towards the end of the purchasing decision, whereas electronic marketing is a major facilitator in the first two steps of the decision process, namely awareness and consideration.

 

Another point that automotive executives should keep in mind is that the preferred target market, namely young adults who may become brand advocates for the rest of their lives if marketed to strategically, is a heavy user of digital media in their decision making processes. This brings me to an interesting article published just this week on CDK Digital Marketing’s website. CDK is an influential automotive digital media agency and hence a major proponent of electronic marketing for the industry as a whole.

 

The article starts off with a J.D. Power study stating that Gen Y buyers have increased in market share at the greatest rate among new-car buyers, and then mentioning a Deloitte study showing that 65% of Gen Y buyers would also prefer to buy a car without negotiating with a salesperson. This information opens up great opportunities, and the author goes on to describe in detail a program run by General Motors called Shop Click Drive that has managed to take advantage of this young demographic’s preference for online shopping. The Shop Click Drive program is a recent marketing tool that allows consumers to go through all the steps in the purchasing process online in conjunction with a local dealer, so that the only interactions that take place between the consumer and the dealer are the test-drive and the actual handing over of the vehicle. The program started out with a few dealers in Michigan, General Motors’ home, and has now been rolled out across the United States.

 

The implications of these new trends in automotive consumer habits are obviously going to have major changes in the way automotive manufacturers market their products. A few companies, such as General Motors, have already managed to tap in to these trends to create digital marketing tools to increase their revenues. And more so than other businesses, the automotive industry with its big purchase items, will need to seriously consider ways to influence consumers in an increasingly competitive market if they are not to be left behind.

 

Articles

McKinsey & Company: “Eight trends shaping digital marketing in the auto industry”

http://www.mckinsey.com/client_service/marketing_and_sales/latest_thinking/eight_trends_shaping_digital_marketing_in_the_auto_industry

Jillian Overmyer, CDK Digital Marketing: “The Generation Y Approach to Car Buying: Revolutionary or Evolutionary?”

http://www.cobalt.com/blog/automotive-reputation-management/generation-y-approach-car-buying-revolutionary-evolutionary/