General Motors, the automotive brand, is drawing on a uniquely rich dataset and placing a focus on the customer as it continues to tap into the opportunities provided by digital technology.
Saejin Park, Director/Global Digital Transformation at General Motors, discussed this subject at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2019 Data and Measurement Conference.
The company’s culture of innovation, reported Park, is rooted in a fast-fail perspective that is as much a mindset as a set of procedures.
It involves, for example, “teaching people that not winning does not mean losing … and creating a culture where we talk about business”, Park said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: How a rich legacy of data transformation keeps General Motors ahead of the pack.)
Building on this theme, Park told the ANA assembly that the conversations around digital have an impressive history at the automaker.
“People today use technology to order food and to consume content in a way that’s never been available before,” Park noted. “But GM, as a company, started its digital division over 20 years ago.”
And that experience, she offered, means the organisation is well positioned even as the very foundations of its business evolve.
With the expanding market for electric vehicles and, potentially in time, autonomous vehicles, “I can see the confidence that GM has the most experience. For someone like us, coming into this space means leveraging analytics,” Park said.
“We have the legacy stuff … There’s a wealth of data that we can work with. That gives us a really good foundation to move forward.”
One vital way of using this data is by solving pain points for customers, be that optimising the way that new vehicles are delivered or creating services that can help drivers plan their journeys to avoid busy traffic spots.
“By focusing on the customer,” Park said, “and providing benefits for the customer”, the technology is able to further the enterprise-wide mission of being part of the community “and a responsible citizen”.
And, as such, it ties into a “zero-zero-zero” (zero crashes, zero emissions, zero congestion) corporate-wide mandate for General Motors.
Sourced from WARC
