In this next sequence, we talk to Simon Sproule, the Director of Global Marketing
Communications at Aston Martin and in this clip, we talk about the problems that
Aston Martin faced when launching its brand in China.
My name is Simon Sproule, I am the Director of Marketing and Communications,
so I perform the CMO role and the CCO role for Aston Martin globally.
We express the brand using three simple words, which is power, beauty and soul. The
Americans would say the elevator pitch for Aston Martin is that we produce
powerful, beautifully styled, handcrafted cars made in the UK and if you're in the
luxury market, you've got a lot of choices and so always the question is,
what does Aston Martin bring that the others don't? And the truth is that in
that market segment, you've got an awful lot of choices. You know, there's half a
dozen brands, all of which are hugely credible. All of which have fantastic
luxury performance and so forth. What we think we bring at Aston Martin is a
unique blend of British craftsmanship, of powerful cars and of eternally beautiful
styling.
When someone's in the market for a luxury, a high-performance luxury
car and so that opens up the choices to many different brands. They're looking
for a combination of evidence of handcrafted excellence in terms of how
we make the cars, they're looking for the performance credibility of the car,
they're looking for technology, but they're also looking for depth and an
emotional connection with the car. So our role, as a brand is how we connect with
them emotionally and how they fall in love with the cars and for us as Aston
Martin, that through styling, that's through coming here to the factory at Gaydon and
seeing the cars being built, that's the connection with the people and the
company. So that's what we think we bring to buyers when they're looking to
purchase car in this segment.
Well, we're a business so we need to sell cars. You know, the luxury market is
growing. Its forecast for solid, robust growth over the coming decade. There are
always going to be wobbles in the market. The last major wobbler was of course the
'09 recession, the Lehman shock and the luxury market suffered and you're seeing,
you know, various wobbles in China and other markets. But long term, the
projection for the luxury market is going to grow. So as a business, Aston
Martin is set for growth and we're going to propel, fuel that growth through new
products, both replacing the existing line of the sports cars, but also getting
into new markets. So how do we expand the brand awareness and how
do we expand the brand understanding to supply that growth? That's the main
challenge so, you know, our occupation at the moment on the brand side is
really saying how do we lay the foundations for building awareness and
understanding of the brand, particularly in markets where we're not so
significantly present at the moment and an example of that would be
China, growing markets around Asia Pacific and even to an extent in
North America where the brand is known but perhaps not as well understood as it
is in the UK.
Well, our point of differentiation starts with the sort of founders vision for the
company, which was to produce fast, beautiful cars and we've not principally
wavered from that original founders vision 103 years ago. So what we bring is
that legacy, that heritage, so a lot of people feel
very comforted by the fact that we've been around for 103 years. They can look
back in time and they can see the evolution of the brand. There are iconic
cars in our history that still today motivate buyers to buy our new cars and
of course probably the most famous of all is the DB5. So the car that was made
famous in Goldfinger.
You manage a luxury brand with great caution. A luxury product by its
very nature is discretionary. So when someone is buying a luxury watch, highly
priced handbag, you know, a tailor-made suit, beautifully made pair of shoes, or a
luxury car, they're buying it both for some functional reasons but principally
they're buying it for emotional reasons and their love of the brand and then
love of what the brand stands for. So in nurturing the brand and in creating our
position in the luxury market, we have to deliver on several fronts. First of all
is price. You know, the entry point for our brand is accessible probably to only
at one percent of the world's population. So immediately where we position the
product automatically puts us in that luxury category within the automotive
space. The second is how we deliver that product. So can someone who sees our cars
they can say "that's a luxury car". You know, the attention to detail, how it's
made, the power of the technology. And we manage that image very carefully. The
interesting part about Aston Martin which is perhaps somewhat different to a
conventional luxury brand is that we have a massive popular following. We have
six and a half million fans on Facebook, we have a million on Instagram
and you might characterise that as the Top Gear crowd. So the lovely thing about
Aston Martin and the thing that we are trying to nurture, which in some senses
is counterintuitive for a luxury brand, is that we want to be rare, we want to be
special, we are expensive but we're also friendly. So there's an interesting challenge
for us, for a brand and marketing point of view, is that we want to respect that
fan base, we want to give them access to the company, but we still need to
maintain the exclusivity of the brand and we do that principally through
price point and production.
So the communication strategy is twofold and it relates a little bit to
my previous point about the duality of us as a brand in that we are selling
to one percent of the world's population because of our price point, but we have
this mass appeal. A great example of how we communicate that is the Bond film.
So the Bond movie and our creation of the DB10 for the last Bond movie, you know,
we produced 10 vehicles for the film. We put only one of those up
for auction at Christie's recently. It fetched over two million pounds, so it's still a
luxurious Aston Martin, still rare and exclusive and we were doing previews for
our clients and behind-the-scenes access, but at the same time, we used assets and
we created content, particularly for YouTube and social media channels, that
showed us how we created the vehicle. Showed how a stunt driver used the
vehicle. We did a lovely little video short where we did 007
using tyre marks, so we've got the DB10 to do tyre marks on a large area of
tarmac and it spelt 007. And that's the lovely thing that people, you
know, appreciate, it's a bit of fun, not taking ourselves too seriously. They share it
with their friends. So that's one example of how we can use a platform like James
Bond to communicate to our buyers and prospective buyers, behind-the-scenes
access, exclusive screenings of the movie, but we can also provide content for that
broader population that are fans of the brand.
Pricing, I mean, you measure the value of a luxury brand in your ability to
price and over time building that pricing and ultimately increasing that
price and that increase in price is reflected through the
transaction price that people will pay for your car as a new product, so any new
car whether it's a Ford Fiesta or an Aston Martin has a sticker
price, MSRP, manufacturers recommended selling price. Whether that car transacts
for that price or not is a good test of the strength of the brand. So
we've been, over the last few years, able to increase our transaction price for
the car because people see the value, they want to be associated with the
brand and so they're prepared to pay for that, you know, for that privilege to
own a car. It is also reflected in a couple of other ways. One is the residual
values of the cars, which is hugely important. Particularly markets like the
US where a lot of cars are leased, so that affects your residual values, so that affects
the monthly payment. You'd be very surprised how many people put an
Aston Martin or Rolls Royce on a monthly payment. You know, it's a lease driven
market, even in the luxury segment and it's also reflected in the classic car
prices of our cars and over the last five plus years, you've seen a dramatic
increase in the value of of all classic cars as an asset class, so people have
invested in classic cars, be they Aston Martin's or Ferraris or whatever and
we've seen particularly strong growth in Aston Martin classic cars for the DB5,
the DB6 and so forth, which is a very good sign that people respect the brand
and are investing in the brand and that all has a very positive
flow through into our new car pricing as well.
There are many challenges when you're managing a global luxury brand because
no market is the same. One of the things that characterizes however a luxury
brand, generally, is consistency. So if you go to a Louis Vuitton store in London,
or you go to Shanghai, or you go to New York, it'll feel the same, it'll smell the same,
it has the same atmosphere, you see that the advertising and the marketing is very
consistent. So consistency is a hallmark of luxury. So we start with
Aston Martin in its home of the UK, which in a sense, somewhat defines us and we
have the highest level of awareness of the brand in the UK, as you would expect.
You can grow up with Aston Martin, they understand it, James Bond is a
popular cultural figure. So we start with that as a base and if you sort of work
out from the UK to other markets, US, continental Europe, Middle East and China,
so you see varying levels of awareness and understanding of the brand and one
of the principal growth areas for us, in terms of market opportunities, is in China.
But what we've seen, we were relatively late into the market in China and what
we've seen is that the Chinese customer appreciates a car like an Aston
Martin but many of them haven't heard of us, or if they have heard of us they don't
perhaps quite understand us, so the challenge that we've been working on is
how do we raise both absolute brand awareness of Aston Martin and how
do we raise understanding of the brand? So that's been one of the
challenges that we've been working on over the course of the last few months.
Well you don't change a brand overnight, so it's a journey and in China you play
for the long term. China is the world's largest car market. It's 20 million cars
out of 85 million year, roughly, it's projected to grow dramatically, its
projected to grow both in the mass market and the luxury market and the car
business, by its nature, is also a long-term business because you're
investing, you know, a car generally takes three to four years to develop,
it's in the market for six plus years so you're looking at a ten-year bet per car.
Very capital intensive, so forth. So very much this is a journey. So you don't fix
the brand overnight, you plan for the future and the business plan that we
have for Aston Martin calls for, over the next five years, a complete renewal of
all of our sports cars, but also the addition of new vehicles like saloons
and the crossover, which we think will have real appeal for the Chinese consumer.
So where do we start in that journey with China? We start with that brand
awareness and that understanding. Now we're a small company, we don't have
massive above-the-line advertising budgets, so we need to do things
differently and one of the places where we're starting is on events, on road
shows, on activation and our dealers. So we've used the James Bond film for
example, during 2015 when the Bond movie was out, previewing that to customers getting
them into the sort of the Bond mythology. But we've also been doing road shows
where we've been interestingly taking, not only our new cars, but some of our
classic cars and last summer, summer of '15, we did a road show where we did
exactly that, so it was an introduction to the brand, so we were explaining the
brand, explaining in the context of the brand and we were showing our classic
cars and, let's face it, everybody appreciates a beautiful car and, you know,
a DB5 or DB6 is a beautiful object. So I think that helped Chinese
customers who are new to our brand set us in context that we've been around a
long time, that we've always made beautiful cars,
you know, the founders vision is still strong within the company and I think
we're going to continue on that strategy to build that level of
awareness and when you're selling a luxury car, you're doing it very much on
a one-to-one basis. You know, this is not a one click to buy market. You know, we're not
talking here about surfing the internet and clicking it and it turns up on
Amazon, you know, delivered to your door next day. You're talking about a very
considered purchase. A purchase that has a lot of emotion in it and people need
to see the product, need to meet the people, need to understand what they're
investing in because, you know, when you're buying a luxury product at our
price point it's, in a sense, an investment as well.
The future of Aston Martin I think is brighter than it's ever been before. The
future calls for the complete renewal of all of our sports car lineup, but it also
calls for the expansion of our product line up to include new product segments
such as saloons, so something that we think will go against Bentley and
Rolls-Royce and also the addition of a crossover. So there are four product
pillars within our business plan, sports cars, saloons, crossovers and special
vehicle projects and special vehicle projects are really interesting because
those are the very high value, very rare cars and last year in 2015, we launched
the Vulcan 1.5 million pounds 24 of a real hit with our collectors and
we're going to continue on that path. So if you look at where we are as a
business today, we have a six year business plan, we're going to more than
double the size of the company. But on a relative basis, we're still going to be
small and exclusive and we're not going to waver from that vision of our founder
which is building beautiful handcrafted cars and the important point there is
about product expansion into particularly the crossover market. Which some say "well,
how can Aston Martin build a crossover? Crossovers are big", and so and so forth.
Our crossover will be beautiful. It has to be, it's an Aston Martin.