Jaguar Is Talking Relationships
Jaguar Cars’ newest California dealership won’t open for at least seven months, but the Ford Motor Co.-owned luxury car maker has been quietly working the crowd for two years with an expensive marketing campaign aimed at persuading trendsetters on the Orange County coast that they cannot live without a Jag or two in their garages.
The campaign, a champagne-and-caviar version of an approach called relationship marketing, has been aimed at insinuating the new dealership, South Coast Motorcars, into the daily lives of the wealthy entrepreneurs, executives and entertainment industry insiders who have already made southern and coastal Orange County the biggest luxury car market in the nation.
And though John Q. Public might not be aware that it is coming, the region’s opinion leaders are already intimately familiar with South Coast Motorcars of Mission Viejo. The dealership has been sponsoring their arts events and charities, playing host to them at lavish parties, wooing them with weekend jaunts to the Hamptons and Broadway plays and generally smothering them with attention since early 1997.
Jaguar officials won’t discuss the budget for priming the Orange County market, but unofficial estimates put the total marketing, advertising and public relations effort well above the $500,000 mark. That includes the costs of underwriting several significant fund-raising events for the Orange County Museum of Art, the Orange County Performing Arts Center and the Assessment & Treatment Services Center, a free counseling program for troubled youth.
In return, Jaguar has asked for and received residents’ opinions about the company and its plans, and about their own needs and expectations.
Madeline Zuckerman, the Newport Beach public relations and marketing specialist hired by Jaguar to be its guide to the hearts and minds of the area’s elite, says the South Coast project team has a file of more than 5,000 people who have voiced interest in the dealership.
The list includes a core of about 500 leading philanthropists and business executives. Keeping them involved and happy is the job of Lawrence E. Williams, who has headed the South Coast project for Jaguar since its inception. He has done it so well that some of the core group now consider him a close friend instead of a marketing agent. And Williams, who was Jaguar’s national franchise director when the project began, resigned in January and moved to Orange County, where he continues to run the South Coast program as head of his own consulting firm, Experience Management Group Inc.
“What they’ve done is extraordinary,” says Joan Riach, a Newport Beach socialite and member of the Orange County Museum of Art’s board of trustees. “Wherever you go in this community of performing arts- and museum-goers, people know South Coast Motorcars. And it’s not even there yet.”
Riach--who drives an older Porsche--said she “desperately” needs a new car and is predisposed to buy a Jaguar from South Coast Motorcars now because of her experiences with Williams and the dealership’s marketing effort.
“It’s not about bricks and mortar, or even about cars,” Williams says. “It’s about the overall experience. These are people who can afford to buy all the luxury goods they want. What we have set out to do is to create a retail experience that they cannot buy--one that shows them how important they are. Everything else will flow from that.”
Jaguar clearly was paying attention when Ford Chief Executive Jac Nasser said he intends to transform the company from an auto maker to a consumer services leader that happens to sell cars.
The luxury marque slunk out of coastal Orange County in 1994 with its tail between its legs, its customers abandoned and angry after its Newport Beach dealership, Newport Imports, closed in a highly publicized bankruptcy. But it always intended to return: The region is simply too rich to abandon. More Mercedes-Benzes are sold there, for example, than in any other part of the nation.
“We need a dealership in that area,” says Stephen Odell, Jaguar Cars’ vice president of sales and marketing. “It is probably the largest sales opportunity for any prestige auto manufacturer in the U.S. and, arguably, in the world. It also is the logical place for us to test some retail things. The whole industry is changing and moving forward. People are now talking about being consumer-led.”
Jaguar is building South Coast Motorcars as a national prototype--Ford-owned Aston Martin Lagonda of North America is a silent partner in the venture, and the dealership will sell Aston Martin cars as well--and it is letting consumers lead the process.
Relationship marketing “is all about trust,” says Barbara B. Stern, chairwoman of the marketing department at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “With these mega-millionaire consumers, you are dealing with people who demand what they want when they want it. . . . What these people seem to be saying is that they want to be nurtured and not left alone again. True luxury is not what you can buy, because everyone with money can buy stuff. It’s in how you are treated.”
As a result of community input, Jaguar has changed the dealership’s design three times, making it smaller and more personal.
The original glass-and-stone approach was tossed in favor of a warmer Mission-style look. A host of high-tech sales gadgets have been discarded because potential customers--including some who head high-tech firms--said they wanted to see and feel real cars, not view them on computer terminals or on an interactive video wall that was to have let customers design a full-size image of the car of their choice from a point-and-click menu.
Finally, Jaguar moved up plans to open a boutique showroom in Newport Beach as a branch of South Coast Motorcars after hearing from the Newport Beach crowd that it wasn’t about to go traipsing out of town to car-shop.
Customers will be able to view Jaguar models and order new cars at the boutique, and Jag owners will be able to drop their cars off there for servicing. (They will be shuttled to the main dealership.)
The decision has created a bit of controversy. Santa Ana-based Bauer Jaguar, Orange County’s other Jag dealership, is protesting the Newport Beach boutique because it is within Bauer’s marketing territory. Jaguar has said it doesn’t believe the limited-service facility would violate California’s anti-competition rules. A hearing by the state New Motor Vehicle Board has been scheduled for Aug. 10.
The flap with Bauer appears to be Jaguar’s only misstep so far.
Odell says the company has nearly doubled its share of the luxury sedan and luxury sports car markets among coastal and southern Orange County residents since it began its marketing effort on behalf of South Coast Motorcars.
“We are close now to our national market penetration of 21.3% [in those two segments],” he said. The sales have benefited Bauer and other Southern California Jag dealers.
Jaguar’s approach makes sense in this new “customer-centric” era, says relationship-marketing specialist Richard G. Barlow, president of Frequency Marketing Inc. in Cincinnati. “It appears that [Jaguar] has taken steps to really understand its potential customers and is adapting all of its presentations and packaging to meet the customers’ perceptions and is seeding the market with pre-acceptance,” he says.
A final score can’t be tallied until the dealership opens for business and consumers can experience it firsthand. But South Coast fans such as Orange County business leader and philanthropist Thomas T. Tierney say the approach seems to be working well so far.
“South Coast Motorcars is marketing to a reasonably affluent community with access to a rainbow of options that are not available to many in the U.S.,” says Tierney, founder and chief executive of vitamin products distributor Body Wise International Inc. in Tustin.
“We will go to the comfort zone where there is trust, safety and convenience, and [South Coast Motorcars] has been packaged so that we are pre-comfortable. It worked on me, and I’m a sales guy.”
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Relationship Marketing 101
Marketing specialists are touting an old business model: Let the customer do the driving. The campaign starts with building relationships and community ties by courting the tastes and opinions of potential customers.
Goal:
* Build customer base by making consumers feel needed and appreciated.
Methods:
* Regularly seek and use customers’ input and criticism.
* Learn and use customers’ names, product and service preferences, likes and dislikes.
* Support local charities, arts groups, schools, youth athletic teams.
* Show customers that they are valued--treat them to special discounts and perks, send birthday and anniversary cards, tip them off to upcoming sales.
* Build trust by keeping promises, honoring guarantees and believing that the customer is always right.
Sources: Barbara B. Stern, marketing department chairwoman, Rutgers University; Richard G. Barlow, chief executive of Frequency Marketing, Cincinnati; Deborah D. Heisley, assistant professor of marketing, UCLA Anderson School
