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A recent article in Marketing Week highlighted some of our most pertinent work for Honda. Our Honda Friends panel, which spans across Honda’s business sectors of cars, motorcycles and power equipment, has had 16, 428 surveys completed over the last 11 months. Typically 1, 000 of the 5, 498 Honda Friends respond within a day. We created the panel because Honda needed a way to rapidly test new ideas, creative, propositions, communications and promotions to drive sales. The feedback from the advocates that have joined the panel is at the heart of decision making at Honda, because they are their most devoted customers. This fundamental shift from unidirectional marketing is clearly gaining a greater mainstream pulling power, as the dialogue between customers and brands is becoming ever more open and authentic.
Our growing expertise in co-creation has buy-in at Honda at the highest levels, because our Honda Town Hall workshops treat customers as equals alongside stakeholders. While uptake of hybrid technology has increased over the past 10 years, awareness remains low, with misconceptions relating to the technology’s function and benefits as well as to its environmental association. The co-creation process developed the most relevant and compelling messages at the core of hybrid, that ‘Hybrid is the smart and normal choice, not environmental choice’ because of the direct interaction between customers and senior Honda staff. Honda have stated that they “want hybrid to be normalised.” The recently launched Jazz Hybrid will stake its claim in embodying this message and communications derived from co-creation as well as enter the approaching hybrid versus electric debate (which we will be eulogising about shortly). Honda have asked us to do at least 3 more Town Hall workshops in the coming months.
Involving customers in answering the business questions about how to drive Honda’s car sales has been central one of our biggest research programmes, Customer Clinics. Taking the stance that, ‘good customer service equal good sales,’ we developed an approach that re-invites customer to their dealerships and reviews every single element of the customer journey for sales and servicing, with underperforming D-Band dealerships. Within a year, 40 of the 57 dealerships that entered our Customer Clinic programme, have improved their performance. Honda have asked us to develop the programme a wider part of their UK dealership network. The focus of this new programme will be broadened to cover other areas such as: dealership communications, creative and & offer testing, and knowledge gathering about the brand, models, and competitors. It’s an opportunity to share knowledge between dealerships, as well as speak to more Honda customers up and down the country. Honda is currently ranked 2nd in the JD Power league for customer service.
Customer understanding has also played a key role in answering the business questions of Sony and AXA. Having never conducted any form of campaign evaluation, Sony didn’t know how customers and staff perceived their campaigns. Our evaluations of their recent point of sale campaigns, World Cup Trade-In and Back to School, give a holistic impression by taking in view points of customers, Sony Centre Managers and Sony Partners. We gave Sony the tools to understand what campaign messages, offers and design customers prefer and ability to measure how these campaigns affect staff engagement and any effects on sales and footfall. Sony are able to measure their success through our research. Similarly, our work with AXA has taken on the needs and desire of their customer’s journeys in regard to improving Sun Life Direct’s online services. With our guidance, AXA redesigned their services online. The changes made under the ‘redefining standards’ proposition centred on the viewpoint of the customer – it was redesigned by them.
We have helped Honda, AXA and Sony realise that these answers are only the beginning of the journey, that good research should directly link helping improve their service and products. We think that the future is no longer distant. It’s happening now, and research methodologies should reflect that, in producing actionable answers beyond insight. We’ll be exploring on this blog, in the coming months, how new types of data and disruptive technologies and trends will have significant business implications for manufacturing, household electronics, marketing and research and automotive industries. Keep walkin…
Hello world!
We’ve been on standing on the verge of getting it on for a short while now, but figured it was about time we really got the journey going! For the uninitiated, we are research agency based in Oxford Circus, with our own in-house viewing facility, providing strategic answers beyond mere insights. We’ll be using this blog to talk about our work and any attention-grabbing trends that have implications for how brands, marketing and research will evolve in the future. You can find out a little bit more about us in the About or Case Studies pages, via Crayon or by contacting us on Twitter or by email if you’d like to find out more.
WaMLabs 