The Ronseal School of Marketing

After much hot air on this blog, it was an incredibly proud moment when the staff at motors.co.uk gathered to watch our advert broadcast during Emmerdale.  I was incredibly nervous about its screening, still suspicious that we hadn’t booked the ad, or had missed a compliance requirement on its submission.

But it screened, and it looked beautiful.  As many of us have said during the creation “it looks like a proper advert”.  We now know it to be a real advert!

We have come an incredibly long way in a short period.  Stripping back our consumer messaging to its very core and also understanding exactly where our brand fits.  motors.co.uk has always focussed on trust and reassurance, and its partnership with newspaper groups has naturally targeted it at a certain audience.  However, we have moved from having a slightly circumstantial brand positioning to a very explicit view of who our audience is.

This will flow through the company to inform product design, tone of any messaging as well as providing the sales team with confidence to know the value and identity of our leads for dealers.  At its core we want to promote “smart, safe and easy car search”.  Additionally, we want people to engage with our brand around some of the emotions of car ownership and buying.  Not all car owners are experts on the specifications, but we all possess hundreds of memories and feelings about our car.

However, I get ahead of myself and make this sound all too fluffy.  I want to reassure you of how basic the first line of our brief was – “we want people to know what motors.co.uk does”.   Fortunately, the team at A&N Creative were able to nail this point quickly and grant us the luxury of thinking more about our brand messaging and positioning.  Thanks to their creative ideas and the research activity led by our head of research, Dermot Kelleher, we were able to be much smarter.

The result is a campaign that after almost 2 weeks on air has seen a significant increase in traffic, engagement and response.  People are also remembering the brand with 150%+ increase in direct and branded search traffic.  This has been an amazing response from a medium that is often pitched for medium-long term brand building.  There is still work to be done in understanding the data and being able to optimise future campaigns, but the initial signs are overwhelmingly positive.

The title of the blog isn’t as crazy as you think.  Production costs were tight and the deadlines even tighter.  The back-up plan was me addressing the camera, pleading with people to come to motors.co.uk.  Perhaps one day … but only if I move into mattress sales.

How accurate is Three Men and a Baby?

After a 5 (plus 9ish) month sentence, Bianca was finally treated to a night out.  Her prison officer Ted left with me and me alone.  Sure I’ve spent lots of time with Ted before, but usually I have had the emergency button of “the boob” if things got out of hand.

Ted slept on the way to drop Bianca off, probably a good thing as it struck her that she was going to be Ted’less for the next few hours.  I decided to kick off my good, responsible parenting immediately and drove home the long way to make sure that he slept for at least 30 minutes.

A weary Ted woke to finally realise that his mother wasn’t around.  There was a weird 10 minutes where Ted was still a little sleepy, a little confused and quiet as he wondered why a) his dad was around on a week day and b) his mummy hadn’t come back.

Ashamedly, I settled with him on my lap and had a quick glance at work emails until Ted wrestled the iPhone from me and into his mouth.  He was back in the room.  The giggles started and he recommenced his quest to steal my glasses.  Even as I type I struggle to see the screen through his grubby fingerprints over my specs.

The next 3 hours were brilliant.  We laughed.  He climbed me.  He dribbled on me (lots).  We played with his toys.  He even played exceptionally patiently whilst I tried to work the steriliser and make his bottle without burning myself.  I knew I’d taken too long and was feeling nervous when I heard a screech from the living room.  My senses went on high alert, was Ted beginning to feel abandoned?  Nope, he’d reached over, got a toy in his mouth and seemed to be laughing at Friends on the TV.  As I rushed in, he stopped, smiled at me and then turned back towards the TV.

I think this summarised the whole thing.  He absolutely bossed our afternoon together.  He held the bottle I tried to feed him with.  He reached for the toys he wanted to play with.  He threw himself backwards when he wanted to play “row row row your boat”.  And even rubbed his eyes 5 minutes before he was due his bath as if to say “I’m not sure you’re aware of the schedule, but I’d quite like my bath now”. 

The sad thing is that once asleep, I couldn’t think of anything else to do but do some work.  I keep looking at the monitor wondering if he’ll wake up wanting to play again.  (he did wake up and he just wanted milk – but only at an acceptable temperature, so I had to make a second bottle)   

I know that it would be incredibly difficult to do this all day every day as Bianca does so naturally (and excellently), but I felt privileged to have this special bit of father/son time.  I hope he enjoyed it and that he’ll let me have another go – frankly, it’s his decision.

Here's a pic of my boss, commanding from his high chair

*****

Incidentally – how weird is this?  I was trying to find the scene from 3 Men and a Baby where Tom Selleck stares blindly at the selection of nappies and formula in a supermarket, when I found this clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF2f__k0Pnw

apparently a whole internet craze about a ghost boy in the film.  I am freaking out.

Economics of a Rate Freeze

Today motors.co.uk announced a freezing of our rates to automotive dealers.  The decision to announce comes on the back of feedback from the market about upward pressure on their media spend.  Obviously a lot of the spend is directed to one major provider, but there has been a trend in the market due to the increasing importance of the internet in generating response for dealers.

At motors.co.uk our aim is clear – to grow quickly to provide automotive dealers with a must-have source of media and to provide consumers with the best used car search experience.  However, our approach is to do it in a collaborative, transparent manner.  We believe that by increasing the confidence of both buyers and sellers we will make the market bigger.

The realities of business mean that whilst we have frozen rates, we believe there is a commercial value to the response we provide to dealers and that we should be recompensed for this.  To generate the response that we do, we have invested millions of pounds in marketing and will continue to spend heavily (as our latest TV campaign shows).  Although the internet lowers initial barriers to entry, it is expensive business building an online brand.

Whilst our rates have been frozen, our traffic and response continue to increase.  Consequently, we are becoming cheaper by the day on a cost-per-lead basis. 

We are lucky to have the backing of one of the UK’s largest media groups, Daily Mail and General Trust, who have a rich history of creating household media brands.  This has provided us with the confidence and resources to invest in marketing, technology and staff to ensure that motors.co.uk can handle fast growth and comfortably serve thousands of dealers.

The balance we have to find as a challenger online brand is to deliver clear value to our customers whilst ensuring we generate sufficient financial return to invest in marketing and technology and also generate a commercial return appropriate to the level of risk taken.  The internet has democratised some sectors but it has also over-rewarded established brands who can bypass the vagaries of search.  Although the current long-tail of poorly populated classified sites and aggregation engines may confuse the customer, I believe that consumers and dealers both deserve choice in classified advertising.  Obviously, I hope they then choose motors.co.uk!