Bridging the Gap Between Brand Strategy and Customer Experience
Overview
Volkswagen Financial Services (VWFS) offers finance and insurance services to customers throughout the Volkswagen Group in the world. The teams focus on meeting customer needs and delivering a personalized experience that reflects the brand aspirations of VWFS.
Customer insight revealed that although VWFS provided a high level of service, their customers wanted a more engaged, relationship-focused conversation. Research indicated significant inconsistencies in the quality of customer interactions, which had become transactional. The main goal was to enhance customer retention, and it was demonstrated that the best approach to achieve this was through increased customer satisfaction.
The Ask
My team at Somo Global was tasked with finding a solution to help VWFS teams deliver a more engaging, personalized, and efficient brand experience for resolving customer inquiries. This solution needed to address a shift in mindset and behavior at all levels, despite limited time available due to operational demands.
To start, VWFS requires its brand proposition to be reviewed and (re)defined, with a clear articulation of its brand values.
The brand proposition should act as the foundation to establish a five year experience strategy that sets out how customers will engage VWFS at every stage of their journey.
support VWFS in changing the way the organization thinks and behaves, ensuring there is truly a customer-first strategy, and not just a corporate strategy that places the customer in the center.
The Approach
Our approach is to address the client's ask through Four workstreams:
The Process — Lean
Understanding VCI's
Audience Desire
I received a presentation containing all the primary and secondary research that the team had conducted before my arrival. My role was to review the research with a fresh perspective and generate valuable insights for internal presentation. These insights would also serve as the foundation for recreating the brand experience of WVFS.
Research Key Insights
The primary and secondary research has shown that there is a need to strengthen the VWFS brand proposition across North America Region.
- VCI customers Don't know what we stand for.
- Dealers see us as a commodity.
- VCI employees don’t feel a sense of shared purpose.
- VCI relationship with their brand is unclear.
Laying the Brand Foundation with VCI Stakeholders
In order to effectively assist others, VWFS or what it is called now VCI brand needs to set clear commitments, define its future vision, create a strategy to attain its objectives, and comprehend the impact it intends to create. That is why we developed a framework to define the VCI brand substance.
Defining the Brand Substance
During this phase, the input of the leadership team was crucial in developing the Brand Substance. This involved defining the brand purpose, vision, and mission statement.
My role was to create a presentation deck for our stakeholders to introduce our main goal of creating a Brand Experience Strategy. This strategy aims to ensure that we deliver a seamless, consistent, omni-channel experience for consumers across all Volkswagen brands (Audi, VW, Ducati) and markets (US, Canada, Mexico).
The presentation also included a workshop plan that was necessary to define the North America Region VCI Brand Personality (Brand Archetype).
Brand Substance Workshop Results
After running several exercises during the brand substance workshop with VCI's C-level team, we were able to come up with the brand substance as follows:
Mapping Out the Brand Battelfield
The market environment is the battlefield where VCI's future customers and competitors Play. When VCI's customers need automotive financial products or services, VCI needs to be the place they go for help. In order to have the best chance of becoming the go-to brand for help, our client will need to deeply understand their identity as an automotive financial service provider and the people they aim to help.
Who's VCI is helping?
To truly understand the client's audience, we had to empathize with their emotional state when they require VCI help. We had to identify the problems the client's audience faces in relation to the issues that VCI solves and understand how these problems impact their emotions. This helped us grasp the significance of VCI to its audience. Branding is all about establishing a connection, and the most effective way to do so is by demonstrating a profound understanding of your customers' problems and how those problems impact their lives.
Who is already helping VCI's audience?
In order to analyze VCI competition, we needed to look at competitors from inside the market and from customers' perspective. This involved analyzing their content, SEO structure, social media channels, and observing their messaging, personality, and customer experience.
Identifying VCI's Positioning and differentiation.
Once we had a clear understanding of how VCI's audience and competitors perceive the brand, we needed to develop a framework to differentiate VCI from its competitors. which involved defining how VCI wants to be remembered by its audience. Our stakeholders were very cooperative and open to new suggestions and ideas.
Humanizing the Brand
When we feel a connection with someone, we subconsciously choose to nurture that relationship. Similarly, consumers choose the brands they want to interact with based on the connections they have with them. This is why we needed to define the VCI brand personality by exploring its Brand Archetype.
VCI brand archetype exploration .
I facilitated a 4-hour workshop with Volkswagen Financial Services' C-level stakeholders. My role was to lead the workshop and prepare a pre-workshop questionnaire to emphasize the importance of finding the brand archetype in the VCI rebrand experience. During the workshop, with the help of two product managers, we conducted icebreaker activities, a brand value exercise, a mission statement anatomy exercise, and a brand archetype activity.
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TURNING ARCHETYPES INTO ATTRIBUTES
After conducting the main archetype activity session with our stakeholders and collecting their answers from the questionnaire I prepared ahead of the workshop day, it became clear that the VCI archetype is 70% Creator and 30% Explorer.
Now it's time for my team and me to prepare a presentation for our client. We will be discussing the following:
- VCI brand attributes,
- VCI messaging framework for voice and tone
- Proposing future strategies for the client's internal communication plan
- Visual and marketing asset launch strategy for internal and external use.
VCI Brand Experience Strategy Summary
Global Vision
“The Key to Mobility”
Global Mission Statement
“ We offer sustainable mobility solutions to match our customer’s mobility needs along all vehicle cycles.”
NAR (North America Region )
Brand Attributes
What's Next?
After exploring and defining the new brand personality and its substances, the next phase will focus on bringing those brand attributes to life. This will involve creating an internal and external campaign strategy to introduce the new rebrand culture to VCI employees, partners, and customers.
Where are we
today?
Phase 1 has focused on establishing the foundational elements of a refined brand strategy, ensuring there is a clearly articulated definition of who you are and what your proposition is.
Where do we go from here?
Phase 2 will focus on defining an internal brand campaign focused on how we socialize the brand purpose and build the culture we need to deliver our experience strategy.
Where do we go from there?
Phase 3 will focus on defining and validating what products, services, and capabilities we need in order to deliver our experience strategy to consumers and dealers.
Reflexion
One effective way to start a brand conversation is by organizing a brand experience workshop. When brands are not clearly defined, it can result in a poor brand experience. By taking into account the overall brand experience, we can remove brand ambiguity and make strategic decisions to clearly define the brand, both internally and for customers.
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