Volvo Brand, Digital & CX Transformation
I worked with Volvo Australia for 7 years on the strategic evolution of their brand, digital ecosystem and customer experience. This involved a mix of strategy development, brand platform development and the execution of various brand, digital, CX and lead generation initiatives and campaigns.
I worked with a broader team, with my role being to lead strategy development, the design of new digital features, performance marketing and community management.
Overview
My work with Volvo spanned 7 years, and helped to deliver an extended period of growth. I have split this project into three key areas, each of which delve into detail of what I did with Volvo:
Repositioned the brand
Generated leads
Digital & CX transformation
Brand
Repositioning the Brand
Volvo had an amazing history and credentials, however the perception of the Australian public was that Volvo = safety. Unfortunately luxury auto buyers are drawn to status and excitement, and see safety as a hygiene factor, so we needed to reposition Volvo if the brand was to grow.
I led a series of strategic projects aimed at repositioning Volvo, through a combination of communications, activations and campaigns.
New brand platform - Omtanke
We started by creating an emotive new local brand platform of ‘Omtanke’. Omtanke is a Swedish philosophy around consideration & ongoing improvement. The Omtanke brand platform emphasised Volvo’s innovations that make both driving and the world in general more effortless & sustainable. In an environment that included other brands positioning themselves as ‘the ultimate driving machine’, and ‘experience amazing’, it stood out as being softer, more considered and welcoming.
We brought the platform to live using a multi-channel campaign, in which we invited people to try Volvo. This played out across TV, outdoor, digital, social, radio, CRM and in-dealership.
Brand in action - Living Seawall
A key part of the repositioning was getting people to talk about Volvo differently. We achieved that by building a Living Seawall in Sydney Harbour that put Volvo’s commitment to innovation and sustainability into practice.
We partnered with Reef Design Labs and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science to design a sea wall with contours that mimicked native mangrove tree roots. The Volvo Seawall was launched under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and gained a significant amount of mainstream media coverage, in which Volvo was talked about in the context of sustainability.
We also developed a Volvo campaign to run at the same time as the launch in order to raise further awareness and consideration.
Ongoing brand development
We continued to position the brand via a range of campaigns and social activities. After 5 years, Volvo Australia was able to transition into more of the global positioning, and participate in more global campaigns based on the alignment of the repositioned brand.
Volvo Omtanke TVC
Volvo Living Seawall case study
Building the Volvo Community
Social campaigns
Volvo’s commitment to sustainability considers the environment in which we live in holistically. To demonstrate this commitment, my team delivered a series off social campaigns highlighting different aspects of sustainability, aimed at building affiliation with the Volvo community.
Wellness Series - bringing the Scandinavian philosophy of hygge - staying well/cosy indoors during winter - to Australian trapped inside during the COVID lockdowns.
Recovery Roadtrip - providing a series of road trip itineraries in multiple States, to encourage the public to take road trips to regional areas to help reinvigorate the local economies, following a combination of COVID lockdowns and widespread bushfires & flooding.
iSpy - showcasing Volvo’s advanced innovation features by installing some of them onto a shopping trolley to help explain how they work in an engaging way at a common setting.
Community management
Additionally my team did Community Management across Volvo’s social platforms. The way my team engaged with owners and potential customers, including the tone of voice used and speed of interaction, was an important part of the ongoing brand delivery, demonstrating the service Volvo owners should expect.
This Community Management also extended into issues & crisis management, with the most common issues being accusations of green washing, issues related to Volvo being Chinese-owned, and issues relating to delays in the delivery of new cars.
Lead Generation
Performance Marketing
The reason to reposition the Volvo brand was ultimately to sell more cars. So following the brand work, I led the creation of a multi-layered performance marketing program that both delivered the sustainability positioning to our target audience, and drove strong results across the entire marketing funnel.
My team created a full funnel campaign, covering awareness, appeal (consideration) and action (conversion). We had four content pillars, which allowed us to deliver on both brand and lead objectives.
We used the awareness layer to create big bursts of awareness around the brand position and product launches to introduce more people into Volvo’s ecosystem.
Through appeal communications we drove interested people to the website to educate them about the Volvo models, and used engaging content in social to introduce model features natively on social platforms.
To drive conversion, we utilised contextual and sequential marketing to retarget interested people with lead gen ads to create test drive bookings and ultimately drive sales.
As we launched new models, we built out new audiences and new messaging for each of these models (see XC40 campaign example). After the initial launch period, these campaigns moved in the ‘always-on stream’, which enabled us to continually build upon our learnings for ongoing optimisation.
The performance marketing campaign was supported by website optimisation and an eDM nurture program.
Digital & CX
Evolving the Digital Customer Experience
Globally Volvo has an ambition to sell 50% of its global volume online by 2025, however many of the global services aren’t available in Australia. Therefore, my team worked with Volvo Cars Australia to create and deliver a local digital transformation strategy including an enhanced series of digital buying tools, including:
Drive away pricing tool
Before anyone will commit to buying a car, they need to know how much it will cost. Volvo’s global digital team struggled with the Australian State-based taxes and pricing , and had delivered a cumbersome and protracted user journey with 16 interactions required, which resulted in a poor experience and low lead completion. My team developed a streamlined drive-away pricing tool with only 3 steps required, which utilised location services and API integrations with external data providers made it incredibly quick and simple to find out the cost of each car.
Finance calculator
40% of new Volvo buyers use Volvo’s financing products, and finance is also a good way of communicating affordability within the automotive sector. My team designed and built a finance calculator that enabled potential buyers to calculate their estimated regular finance payments for both a standard car loan or for Volvo’s guaranteed future value product. This calculator was embedded into model pages, the car configurator, the driveway pricing tool, and the finance section of the site. Buyers are also able to add their finance calculation into their test drive request.
Trade in estimator
We partnered with a third party provider to build a trade-in estimator that provides potential customers with a transparent view of their vehicle’s likely trade-in value.
Order tracker
My team designed and built a tool to enable recent buyers to track the progress of their car from production through shipping and delivery.
Online sales journey
My team designed the user flows and experience for a future facing online sales journey. This combined functionality and content from the global site with the tools above. We worked closely with the Volvo Regional Salesforce team to ensure that all relevant information captured in this journey was fed into the CRM system, so that the fulfilment process could be as automated as possible.
Digitising the Dealer Experience
In addition to evolving the online experience, I led a series of initiatives to digitise elements of the dealership experience. This included providing tools for both dealers and customers.
For dealers, we focused on delivering information & functionality that the dealers told us was important to them, and which they couldn’t get easily elsewhere. This included:
Detailed product information & specs,
Information to to support prospective buyers in the dealership on the occasions when all dealers are busy with other customers,
Access to up to date video content to use in the dealership,
National sales data & dashboards, and
The ability to submit service requests to Volvo
These elements were delivered through a Dealer App, which provided access to product information, sales data & dashboard, and to submit service requests to Volvo Cars Australia.
Additionally we delivered some customer facing tools to help the sales process in the dealership, which included:
A digital ‘silent salesperson’ iPad app to support prospective buyers while browsing cars themselves, and
A centralised video content feed for the TV screens throughout the dealerships, which was updated digitally and provided relevant and up-to-date content.
Imagining the Future Customer Experience
As Volvo looks to the future, it is looking for more ways to differentiate itself from other luxury automotive brands. To support this ambition, I have led two major projects focused on reimagining the future customer experience.
CX Audit & Strategy
This project started with a comprehensive review of the end-to-end consumer experience, from making initial contact with Volvo through to servicing and potentially upgrading your Volvo after multiple years of ownership.
We reviewed:
What is the CX today?
How well is the CX delivered?
Where can the CX be delivered, and why?
My team delivered 3 main outputs:
A digital CX map - a fully interactive, searchable, and editable representation of the Australian Volvo consumer journey, including all communications and interactions.
44x opportunity briefs - tightly defined ‘briefs’ identifying and providing clear direction on key opportunities to uplift the Volvo CX in Australia across the front- and back-end.
Prioritised roadmap - an impact-effort based prioritisation of the opportunities, with an implementation roadmap for medium to high priority opportunities across the short, medium and long term.
Membership
One of the opportunities identified in the CX Strategy was related to ‘Membership’. Using the opportunity brief, we developed a strategy to transform the experience of being a Volvo owner from paying for a service once or twice a year, into a membership program that delivered a series of benefits for Volvo owners.
By reframing the ownership experience into a membership experience, we were able to deliver a plan to optimise the lifetime value of each owner.
Impact
Impact
Since I started working with Volvo in 2017, they have grown by 137%, increasing annual sales from 4,681 in 2017, to 11,128 in 2023 (Source: VFacts).
While there are many factors that contribute to that, undoubtably the repositioning of the brand, the upgraded digital ecosystem, the focus on CX and the performance marketing campaign have made a significant contribution.
In addition to the sales uplift, the work I led and/or delivered has been recognised with multiple awards, including: WARC Grand Prix for Effective Innovation, MFA Grand Prix for Business Impact, and multiple Effies.
