A luxury global automaker helps its China-based retailers boost their marketing prowess

Automotive giant Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has reason to take pride in its China operations, which are based in Changshu and include a joint venture with Chinese automaker Chery. In the 2018-2019 fiscal year, JLR’s network of 240-plus independent retailers collectively sold nearly 99,000 vehicles in China — 17% of global sales. 

But JLR wanted to boost its market share in China by augmenting already impressive sales in top-tier cities — which accounted for 28% of all sales — with growth in the country’s less-populous cities. 

To do this they had to devise marketing campaigns that reflected the national brand and strategy while also accommodating local customers’ preferences. To help retailers meet this dual imperative, JLR needed to assess the effectiveness of retailers’ current marketing activities first and pinpoint actions to improve performance — and thus secure adequate returns on marketing investments. This required sophisticated market intelligence at the local level.

In the past regional and retail managers filled out Excel spreadsheets manually; reports were generated only once a quarter; and decision-makers at all levels couldn’t easily share and analyse marketing-related data. That made it difficult for central marketing to gauge local campaigns’ performance. Without transparency at this level, JLR couldn’t help retailers improve. 

Working with JLR, PwC designed a cloud-based market-intelligence solution aimed at overcoming these hurdles. The digital platform enables data-gathering on every aspect of retailers’ marketing campaigns virtually, in real time. Some data is structured — such as type, time, location, budget, and vehicle models featured at showroom promotional events. Other data is unstructured — for instance, photos of events from salespeople’s mobile phones, and video from TV advertisements and customer test drives. 

Data entered into the platform is displayed on easy-to-read dashboards and can be updated almost hourly. Marketers at all levels can quickly review calendars showing upcoming retailer campaigns. And they can assess performance using key indicators for each initiative, such as ROI and number of leads and orders generated.

The new platform is already generating impressive value for JLR. It supports marketing-related data-sharing and decision-making across the national, regional, and local levels. Regional marketing managers reviewing results from retailer campaigns can evaluate how well the campaigns reflect the JLR brand, while also meeting local needs. And they can offer coaching as needed to help retailers redesign their marketing tactics to quickly address performance shortfalls. Retailers can also easily share best practices gleaned from analysis of their marketing-performance data. 

The improvements made possible by the new system have translated into measurable business results. Automation of leads processing has reduced the number of duplicate and invalid leads in JLR’s leads pool by 30%. Time required for retailers to plan marketing events has shrunk by 50%. And regional managers can now approve marketing plans in just minutes on the platform, instead of spending weeks reviewing manually prepared Excel spreadsheets and emailing back and forth with retailers.