Marketing Electric Cars in China

The Chinese Central Government Ministry of Commerce recently announced its Energy Saving and New-Energy Auto Industry Development Plan, which outlines objectives to sell 500,000 new-energy vehicles in 2015 and to have 5 million vehicles on the road by the end of 2020.

Despite these plans, the new-energy vehicles are not yet being bought at the volumes that the Ministry of Commerce would like to see. If you ask the population about electric cars in China, their feedback will most likely be that they are too expensive and not as easy to run as traditional petrol cars.

The investment that is taking place around infrastructure should help people see that these worries are no longer founded in truth. However, marketing these vehicles and overcoming those outdated opinions is going to be essential for everyone to be successful in this space.

Digital marketing campaigns will therefore play key roles for individual vendors, and for the sector as a whole. Digital marketing is essential, as it can provide a more personal level of experience and educate people in more efficient ways than the "broadcast" approaches represented by traditional marketing strategies.

This shift in marketing strategies is already starting for traditional cars.

Volvo China, for instance, received investment from Chinese company Geely and has increased its range of new-energy vehicles, including new models announced at the Guangzhou Motor Show. What is interesting is that Volvo’s strategy is shifting over to more online marketing in the future. This means more investment in online experiences that appeal directly to buyers. When Volvo announced this in December, the emphasis was on how the Volvo brand would support all of its activities and ensure consistency.

This approach is essential when you are working across multiple channels. The company is already trialing online selling campaigns, where customers can buy through internet services instead of visiting a dealership – one of these resulted in 1,927 cars being sold through a Web campaign.

Volvo is not the only company to experiment with online channels. The Mercedes-Benz SMART Car division sold cars through a dedicated WeChat campaign earlier this year. This was incredibly successful – using the app, users could buy special-edition vehicles that would only be available via WeChat.

However, the campaign was almost too successful. Within three minutes of going live, 388 people had put down deposits on cars, while an additional 6,000 requested further contact with the brand to discuss a purchase.

What led to this level of success? Well, the use of the digital channel was important – it is a channel that people know, they use every day, and they trust their interactions on it. However, what is different here is how the overall experience around the brand took multiple potential actions into account.

For those that wanted to commit to a purchase, the option was there to run everything through the social app, representing a truly frictionless purchase. For those that just wanted to experience what the car and the offer could provide, the option was there to move over to another channel as well.

This represents an extensive multichannel approach, moving people from online conversations and information gathering through to conversions that can also be online, or can be fulfilled through offline services that are more traditional.

The ability to control the experience and make it interactive is a really appealing one when you are looking at high-value purchases like these. These are the first examples and further companies will follow up on these projects as they become successful.

By thinking about the customer journeys for different personas, digital marketing campaigns around automotive can be more successful than relying on online awareness or traditional dealerships on their own.

For many automotive campaigns, things are joined up at the creative level, involving use of the same assets across dealerships, traditional marketing, and online. However, I don’t think that will be enough in the future, as there has to be more thought around the customer journey through different calls to action.

Digital marketing can take the front seat here, as it can be more agile and responsive to the changes in customer behavior and preferences. As the likes of Volvo and Mercedes lead the charge in taking "digital-first" campaigns around the auto sector, companies involved in the new-energy vehicle sector will be able to take advantage of these shifts very soon.