A Guide for Car Dealers: The Brand Experience in the Automotive Sector

The automotive industry, like many others, has seen digital marketing become an essential component of the overall brand experience, seamlessly integrating into a sophisticated communication system enabled by new technologies. This article explores the concept of brand experience in the automotive sector and provides key insights for its successful implementation.

Before we begin, it is essential to point out that through automotive e-commerce, it is also possible to offer vehicles from different European countries for purchase. However, to ensure that the consumer can drive their cars in all Europe without any restriction, it is essential to also provide the certificate of conformity. The best solution for obtaining this important certificate is to turn to a specialised portal such as EUROCOC.

Understanding Brand Experience in Automotive

Brand experience refers to the process of creating meaningful interactions between a company and its audience, aiming to influence brand perception. This experience is crafted using various resources and intentional messaging to establish an emotional connection with the consumer, embedding itself in their imagination and influencing their behavior and choices.

In the context of automotive retail, the brand experience plays a pivotal role in guiding the intangible aspects of customer decision-making processes, linked to intuition and emotion. To achieve a positive impact, it’s crucial to focus on targeted initiatives rather than repetitive activities to increase brand awareness among consumers.

Research by Brakus, Schmitt & Zarantonello highlights that brand experience is not inherently positive or negative but depends on the customer’s internal response to external brand stimuli. This experience significantly affects consumer satisfaction and loyalty, with positive experiences encouraging repetition and negative ones being remembered as to avoid.

It’s noteworthy that brand experiences can spread rapidly, especially negative ones, as customers tend to share them through word-of-mouth and digital channels. Echoing Jeff Bezos, an unhappy customer might share their opinion with six friends in the physical world, but on the Internet, this could reach up to 6,000 people.

Hence, the brand experience influences both the brand perception derived from past experiences and the future loyalty of the customer. This underscores the importance of carefully managing all customer interactions that can be controlled or influenced to ensure a positive impression and build a lasting relationship with the audience.

The Importance of Brand Experience

Customer experience has become a critical battlefield for companies, recognizing that offering excellent service, while still crucial, is just one of the elements contributing to the total customer experience.

Building an Effective and Meaningful Brand Experience in the Automotive Sector

Investing in brand experience initially involves dedicating time and energy to accurately understand your target customers. This approach aims to create ideal conditions to provide products or services that meet specific needs and increasingly high expectations.

Marketing should then seek opportunities to establish empathetic contact with customers, shifting focus from analyzing individual interactions to caring for the experience provided throughout the entire customer journey.

Incorporating knowledge of individual experiences into every piece of content produced and distributed across various touchpoints and channels will help create internal consistency at every stage of the purchasing process.

A More “Human” Brand Experience for Truly Personalized Customer Experience

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows for the use of information from various sources connected to the vehicle’s computer to offer quicker and more accurate functions, such as real-time traffic alerts, emergency roadside assistance, and automatic driving in specific situations. This enhances the quality of the customer experience.

However, this section focuses on the “human” dimension, rather than technology. The major contribution of IoT to the automotive industry is the increase in knowledge companies can access. Yet, this information becomes meaningful only when it can concretely solve real people’s problems in their daily lives.

A brand experience based on extracting value from data becomes a more human experience, aimed at people and capable of providing concrete answers to their needs. Offering personalized content and solutions, aligned with the preferences and expectations of each specific customer, is crucial for any personalization initiative.

However, personalizing the customer experience loses value if not supported by an integrated strategy between e-commerce and the sales network. It’s necessary to go beyond the minimum level of personalization, intervening in both content creation to make it more relevant and distribution through interactivity and omnichannel strategies to offer truly personalized experiences.

Digital Marketing Serving Brand Experience in the Automotive Sector

Lead generation and management are at the heart of any digital marketing strategy. In the automotive sector, companies can adopt a widespread approach to lead generation, valuing data related to users interacting with various digital touchpoints of dealerships, automakers, and industry companies. These interactions can occur through actions such as filling out forms, downloading catalogs, or contacting via chat on the website.

E-commerce also offers significant opportunities for vehicle sales, if the sector fully exploits them. Currently, only a small percentage of vehicles are sold entirely online in Europe, but this suggests there are ample margins for improvement. This situation can be a strategic point to stimulate the creation of hybrid e-commerce experiences, combining the advantages of online purchasing with those of physical presence and interactions with retailers.

Before the purchase decision phase, automakers, OEMs, and retailers must compete to capture customers’ attention. This “battle” will not only be based on product quality, such as technical performance and price, but will also have a strong link with the quality of the experience offered, the brand, and consumer attention. Creating engaging and memorable experiences will be crucial to stand out from the competition and win the trust and loyalty of customers in the long term

Brand Experience in the Automotive Sector: Context and Prospects

The digitization in the automotive sector is leading to significant changes not only in the driving experience but also in the purchasing process and the organization of sales networks. Consequently, major industry players must be ready to revise their commercial approach, adopting new methods, tools, and marketing strategies with a particular focus on e-commerce. This situation implies an investment in adapting and implementing new digital technologies aimed at enhancing the purchasing experience and meeting the ever-growing expectations of customers.

How Customer Experience is Changing in the Automotive Sector

Digital tools are reshaping customer experiences in the automotive industry, with a growing preference for blending online and offline interactions for convenience, transparency, and cost-effectiveness. The trend towards digitalization is evident as consumers increasingly rely on online research and review videos before purchasing cars. Consequently, the automotive customer journey is now more digital, featuring multimedia elements like photo galleries, test drive simulations, and 360-degree virtual tours to familiarize customers with vehicles. This digital shift aims to meet the expectations of a new generation seeking integrated mobility experiences.

Adapting to Digital Expectations Amidst Changes

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need for contactless solutions in automotive retail, pushing dealerships to enhance the buying experience with innovations like virtual customization and remote vehicle delivery. The challenge remains to integrate online and offline data to offer holistic brand experiences. Modernizing showrooms into experience centers with VR, AR, and interactive technologies, along with user-friendly digital platforms, is crucial for a seamless brand experience across all touchpoints.

Embracing an Omnichannel Strategy for Customer Engagement

To effectively engage automotive customers, an omnichannel strategy that mirrors and simplifies their purchasing journey is essential. This involves mapping user identities across channels, syncing online and offline activities, and leveraging data to understand customer needs deeply. Creating a consistent, cohesive brand experience across digital channels is key to understanding and responding to consumer preferences and needs, ensuring a customer-centric approach in the automotive sector.