Honda, the automaker, is marrying data with a range of new technology to reach European consumers in ways that are relevant rather than personal.

“What we’ve tried to do at Honda is bring the brand to life through the new tech that comes up,” Louise Furneaux, marketing communications section manager at Honda Motor UK, told the recent Festival of Marketing conference in London.

While the auto marque, in common with many other brands, gathers tracking data to build a picture of its customers and their journeys towards purchase, it has not gone down the personalisation route.

“People are becoming more sensitive to personalisation, it’s got a bit creepy,” Furneaux noted. “So instead of personalisation, we’re looking at relevancy.” (For more, read WARC’s report: How Honda UK uses new tech to grab attention and stay relevant.)

“Ultimately, you’re trying to make that customer experience as smooth as possible by taking away irrelevant messages,” she explained.

One example of this approach paid off handsomely, when Honda discovered that, for detailed information about the features of its cars, people had to go to third-party review websites.

In response it created the Honda Real View Test Drive, which was designed to fill this content gap as well as adapting its output to a changing market, which sees an average of just 1.4 visits to a dealership before purchase.

A first-person point-of view-film allows would-be buyers to look around and see inside the car. But at key moments the film stops and the consumers can enter a virtual showroom to get the various technical details.

“We brought this product information on to our platforms, that people were previously having to go offline to get. They had that seamless customer experience,” Furneaux said.

The results were impressive, as dwell time increased to eight minutes, and Honda’s four main KPIs (brochure download, find a dealer, book a test drive, configure a car) all increased.

“We’d never had anything like this in Honda before with the content we’d created,” Furneaux reported. “By putting this on to our platforms we’d increased lead gen, because there was such a positive response to it.”

Sourced from WARC