Ian Beavis has played both sides of the agency-client fence in his 20-year advertising career. Today, he is senior vice president of marketing for Mitsubishi Motors, and was the brains behind the "SeeWhatHappens" campaign. Before that, he was marketing communications manager for Ford's Lincoln Mercury, worked for Saatchi & Saatchi as executive vice president, group account director, leading the Toyota business in more than 30 countries. Beavis also held senior positions at the company's Toronto and Sydney offices and managed several assignments in Asia, was president of Foote, Cone & Belding Seattle, and regional director on the agency's Daimler Chrysler Asia Pacific business. He was also the executive director of mergers and acquisitions, consolidating the operations over 35 countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Beavis spoke at the iMedia Summit last week in Maryland, and here are highlights from that address. Follow along with his PowerPoint presentation.
If someone had told me last November that I would be back in the car business, doing this, I would have told them that they were nuts. I would have told them that it would be even stranger that I would be in Southern California doing it. But here I am and Mitsubishi, as you know, is a company that is not without its issues at the moment. But I must admit that we have $4.2 billion reasons to be happy based on some investments last Friday. So to quote Mark Twain, "the rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated."
And what I'm about to present to you today is a large part of our business plan going forward, and some lessons learned, and some results from what we did recently -- and then how we plan to pursue things in the future. I'm sure everyone in this room has heard of Mitsubishi, or Mitsubishi Motors, but probably very few of you even know that we have about 11 models available. I might add that until I joined the company, I didn't realize it either. And that's a little bit of a problem, and frankly, that problem is what got me the job.
If you look at Mitsubishi over the years, we've had tremendous increases in brand awareness. This is 1998 going to 2003, going from 44 to 62 percent. Which is a pretty good lift, and it gets you into the same ballpark as the big guys. And everyone was very proud and talking about awareness. But the shocker here is, when we were at 44 percent awareness, you can see that we're at 0.8 intentions, and at 62 percent awareness, we're at 0.8 intentions, and if you think about the hundreds of millions of dollars that got us from 0.8 to 0.8, you can see why they hired me.
Because this is a public forum, I won't say what I said in the interview, but I was asked actually by the chairman of the company to what I attribute the gap between 62 percent and 0.8 -- and it wasn't very pleasant, so we have quite a job to do. So I just should explain, the 0.8 down there is intentions. That's someone who in a survey is asked, "Do you intend to buy a new car in the next six months?" and they name a Mitsubishi. And that is what is basically natural demand, and what is even more scary about this chart is during that time, we went from about 150,000 vehicles sales to 345,000. And how did we manage to do that? Well, we did it with a number of things, but most people think we did it with this…
(Beavis played the Mitsubishi commercial that used Dirty Vegas' 'Days Go By' as a soundtrack.)
We're in the music video business. I must say, I don't think that girl had a spine. It was extraordinary. Anyway, we got a lot of buzz, a couple of groups got Grammys. And I wish we had gotten the bloody Grammy. Um, doing a lot of rock videos and they were very image-driven and they were all very wonderful and everyone in this room feels highly entertained, but not in the least bit motivated.
What had happened was while we were selling all those videos, we were selling this 'Bigger, Better Zero Event' [newspaper and local TV campaign]. And we were very deal-centric. We basically had this image at the top of the food chain and then just blasted you with deals and gave you a cheap car.
What we basically did was ensure that if you wanted to know something about a Mitsubishi, we weren't going to bloody tell you, but more to the point, we weren't going to give the brand any substance. And as my boss pointed out when I was moaning about this the other day, he said you shouldn't complain, because that's why you're here.
And this is the kicker: After all our effort, this is a survey at the end of 2003, 32 percent of the reasons for buying a Mitsubishi were price and deal related. There was absolutely no natural demand, and therefore there was no foundation going forward for the brand. So we had to really start from scratch. So when I arrived at the end of November, which seems like an eternity ago, we basically had to go back, look at what we had done well, which frankly wasn't much, and start again.
Because at the end of the day, this isn't rocket science, it's very basic stuff. What we need to do was to broaden our target audience. It was really very much a demographic rather than a sociographic. We had to find out what a Mitsubishi was. I don't think we had ever told anyone -- it was like a secret. We had to increase purchase intentions. Just going from 0.8 to 0.9 to 1 percent is millions of dollars in revenue to the company, millions. We had to focus on core models. We had had 11 models and advertised them all, none of them effectively. And we had had to embrace that fact that we're small.
Customers had to justify buying Mitsubishi
While Mitsubishi Motors is relatively small, Mitsubishi Corporation is an enormous company. But within the company, we had to celebrate our smallness and, frankly, become a challenger brand. If you buy a Honda or a Toyota, you don't have to justify that decision to anybody. If you buy a Mitsubishi or a Mazda, you do, and what we have to do is give people those tools.
So who are we? Well we're, and we would still seem to be bold, sexy and confident -- but very young, and very much to a demographic, basically, the under 30s crowd. When we clinic'd the new Galant about a year and a half ago, people loved the car, but anyone over 30 said it's not for me. Mitsubishi is for young kids. That's a problem when the core of that segment is 45 year olds. So it had gone now to a mindset which I would call "young at heart." It basically is celebrating that youthful orientation and the confidence it brings, but making it more inclusive. So we are obviously advertising to Boomers, but also to Gen-Xers and Gen Y. And various cars in various commercials will talk to those audiences, but it won't be one very narrowly targeted message from that standpoint.
I was in Japan during the development of a new brand strategy earlier this year, which was the whole revitalization plan of the company. It was amazing looking at 35 countries. You could see little nuggets of what the brand really stood for, and we'd lost our way to some extent.
So the three areas that we really would be focusing on is styling engineering and dynamic driving performance. Styling is something that we do have, and will continue to have, and that's a very personal decision. If 50 percent of the population say, "I love your car," great. If 50 percent say they hate my car, that's also great. We are not going to be all things for all people. I'm not going to be producing Toyotas and Hondas. We have a very strong history of Japanese engineering bias in the company that we really have to start to celebrate and differentiate. And finally, driving dynamics, which I'll get to in a little bit.
But these are very core aspects of the brand, and we've started pursuing the direction from here on in. We need to build intentions. We need to emphasize the rational. You can never just emphasize the emotional, there has to be a rational part to this. As I said, we have to give people a reason why. The car is the star. That is not to say that I would be producing moving print ads on television. I'm not going to produce the sort of advertising that Detroit does.
I'm going to be producing advertising that is engaging and is informative, and rewards the viewer for their participation on the Web, on television, or in print, or anywhere at all. We're going to aggressively position ourselves against the competitors. Because we're small, we can be the challenger and we can name names. And we're going to tell a value story. We have a 10-100 warranty and we have a tag which I'm very proud of at the end of our 10-100 warranty ads which says: "And now you have a 10-100 warranty on a car that you actually want to drive" -- which is a little bit of a shot at those Korean fellows who have those horrible little things.
And by the way, Finn O'Neil, who's my boss, came from Hyundai -- now we're comparing ourselves to Hyundai and Kia, and to Toyota and Honda -- he thinks it's a plot by me to make sure he can never work for another auto company.
And so far, it's working. And we're going to talk about quality. Quality is basically the floor of any brand. You have to build from a quality floor. And we'll be emphasizing that, and then there will be the value for the money, based on the quality we produce, the warranty we provide and the price of the product. We're going to focus on core models.
We've got 11 models, but the reality is that Galant and Endeavor are in the two biggest segments, they're very high-volume products for us, and they're very competitive products for us. If you look at the total media for our company going forward for the next two years at least, about 80 percent of our activity will be against those models, which is a lot of money, um, rather than dissipating across 11. That's not to say that everything won't get some form of communication and advertising, it will.
But we'll drive dealer traffic and intentions for those vehicles. If someone comes in with a Galant, they can move up to a Diamante or across to an Eclipse down to a Lancer. On an Endeavor, they can move up to a Montero, or down to an Outlander. And we're already seeing, in the early stages of the campaign, that this is starting to work for us.
Embracing challenger status
And, of course, we have to embrace our challenger status. We have to educate consumers in the places in the market we have participated, and we have to aggressively position ourselves against the competitors and be proud to be different. We are very, very aggressively going after the competition. That is not to say that I necessarily want Toyota and Honda buyers, but I want people to understand that they are the gold standard, and we can play with the big guys.
If you think about the size of Toyota and Honda, they get such a lift from just the UAO. They have basically millions of cars on the road, they are part of the fabric of life. I'm not that and frankly I never want to be. I want to be bigger than I am, and I want to be a damn-sight more profitable, but I want to find a place that is very profitable and engaging consumers that want my type of product, which will not be the same as them. We also needed to change the way we spend our money, develop consistent messaging, and create a new media model and diversify our media mix.
It was pretty extraordinary when I arrived -- I'll show you a chart in a moment -- but basically, the media plan that I saw for Mitsubishi could have come out of 1985. Ah, it was just stunning. I thought they were kidding. I might add, to their credit, that when I joined the company, they told me everything that I was confronted with, and they weren't joking.
I had been drinking from a fire hose from the day I arrived. But it really was extraordinary to me how one-sided the media mix was, and the results we got really were no surprise. We then bundled our media, as you're probably aware. Deutsch is our agency for all our creative product, and we consolidated all our creative with them, and they do all our planning, and they are a fabulous agency. But since we're owned by Daimler-Chrysler -- some days I don't know whether I should learn Japanese or German -- they are with DaVinci and PHD for our media buying. So we are looking at our media differently and making it more efficient. And now we have two voices looking at it, giving us advice, which is like sibling rivalry, but it seems to work.
Monday: Mitsubishi's new marketing mix and career-altering moments.
