Volvo, the automotive company, has used an increasingly coordinated approach behind the scenes in Brazil to deliver more impactful marketing, thus helping the brand achieve record sales in the country.

Camila Mateus, Volvo’s head/marketing in Brazil, discussed this subject during a session at the Festival of Media Latin America (FOMLA).

“The digital landscape makes everything move faster,” she said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: Volvo drives record sales in Brazil with a transformed marketing model.)

In response to the rapid pace of change, Volvo wants to be “assertive” in its messaging – not just from an awareness point of view, but in delivering right-time, right-place messages to people who will want to “consume” the brand’s communications.

And that task, in turn, has its own set of challenges, Mateus offered: namely, “To be a part of the journey for people … How can we be present for those people anytime that they want? For me, that means we need to be assertive.”

Over a series of eye-grabbing campaigns – whether related to social-media, helping people sell cars made by its competitors or instantly streaming real-life driver responses to Volvo test drives – the brand has activated this approach in interesting ways.

That strategy, in turn, has assisted Volvo in generating record sales in Brazil. And it has also required an increasingly coordinated approach behind the scenes, not least around Volvo’s long-term focus on safety.

“For the last two years, we’ve involved our whole ecosystem – our agencies, our third-party groups, and everyone who work closely with us – in our purpose,” Mateus said.

To demonstrate the breadth of that change, she continued, a dashboard of digital tools can now deliver “a flow for the consumer journey,” with insights at each stage on the path to possible purchase.

Such behind the scenes cohesiveness, she emphasised has been – and remains – a critical part of Volvo’s marketing programs: “We have one team with one objective with one goal. Everyone is on the same frequency,” Mateus said.

The result? A true sense of collaboration across the entire communication landscape. By removing the “egos” of individual players, “we all understand the objectives that we want ... We’re achieving a higher standard.

“We can choose which [tools] will give us a better sense of what to avoid, what to repeat, or what to recover on the next time. And we are also partnering with a few researchers, enterprises, and a few media outlets.”

Sourced from WARC