Ford entered the Indian market as early as 1995 with a 50:50 joint venture with Mahindra. It later bought the stakes in Mahindra Ford and renamed the company as Ford India Private Limited.
Though Ford Ikon and Ford Fiesta have been quite successful in the Indian market, the car maker was competing only in the 20 per cent of the automobile market till it launched Figo – in the small car segment, where the volumes are – in March 2010.
The Challenge
The challenge for Ford was clearly to increase the volumes, which would come from the small car segment, which already had strong players like Maruti and Hyundai. Another challenge for Ford was how to excite the Indian consumer towards the brand.
The Strategy
Listen to people, talk to people, and give them what they want was the approach Ford took. While Figo was launched with interior designs inspired from Indian culture, efforts like Fiesta Experience, Fiesta Cafe and the latest Swap Your Drive, are about engaging the consumer and hearing them out. The auto brand has taken a two-pronged approach – experiential and digital, which is all about engaging the consumer.
Nigel Wark, Executive Director of Marketing, Sales and Service, Ford India, tells that a lot of this learning has come from experiences at the global level, when the brand wasn’t focused on the outside. “It made us realise that we have got to be in touch with customers and since time between understanding and execution is three to five years, we have to execute and deliver products for the future. It came from the humbling nature of being on the brink,” he says.
Nigel Wark, Executive Director of Marketing, Sales and Service, Ford India
The Implementation
To start with Figo, Ford engaged the consumer with its Discover Smart Drive initiative, where it picked four couples on a drive from Chandigarh to Chennai – a 30-day trip, covering almost 100 kms per day, trying to bring their experiences to life through social media.
Meanwhile, Fiesta Cafe in New Delhi, is an experiential initiative, a technology hub, that delivers the excitement of the look and feel that the product has just from the tech point of view.
Similarly, the latest ‘Swap Your Drive’ too had four customers from Delhi, Mumbai and Ludhiana exchanging their owned cars for a Classic, Figo, Fiesta or Endeavour ranges for a week.
Their experiences and reactions were turned into TVCs. Swap your Drive is an extension of the Fiesta Experience campaign, where four individuals shared their experiences of driving a Fiesta.
“A lot of products are sold around a lot of razzmatazz, such as price point etc, but we believe in such test drives being an important part of engaging consumers directly with the product,” says Wark, adding, “Real people work out as better talent and bring the benefits of the product to life.”
Such initiatives, Wark believes help in co-creation. “If you are not engaging your consumers as co-creators and marketers for your brands, your competition will!,” he adds.
To identify and understand its consumer well, people from Ford, without revealing their identity, interact with consumers at their homes and offices to understand their desires and aspirations and conduct psychographic tests. While this is a global practice for Ford, in India, such an exercise lead to personifications of its target audience as Sandeep and Ajay. While, Sandeep personifies the target audience of Figo, Ajay aspires for Fiesta.
Recently, Ford also came out with celebrations – Ford Figo Bharat Yatra – when Figo crossed the 1,00,000 sales mark. The celebrations that went on for over 100 days, across 1,000 towns in 20 states (Tier I, II, and II cities), saw over 82,000 footfalls and over 17,500 test drives.
Results
As per Wark, Ford India sold 1,01,439 wholesale and export vehicles from January to October (2011), compared to 77,324 units sold during the same period last year (2010) – a 31 per cent increase.
While, Ford opened its 200th sales and service outlet recently, it hopes to expand its sales and service network to more than 220 outlets in 120 cities by the end of this year.
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