PORSCHE JOURNEY MAPPING
03
With global brands, there are multiple physical, digital and region-specific touchpoints. Each of these touchpoints have varying degrees of significance towards brand perception. Porsche Middle East (PME) wished to understand the impact and expectations across multiple touchpoints of the car buying journey in 6 different markets - United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Egypt, Kuwait and South Africa. By evaluating the luxury car buyer journey in detail, PME wanted to gauge key drivers of brand loyalty and reinforcers of brand values.
CONTEXT & NEED
TARGET AUDIENCE
We decided to include a sample of 10 participants in each of the 6 markets - UAE, Saudi, Kuwait, Egypt, Morocco & South Africa. Effectively, we would be gathering data from 60 luxury car owners. We approached both male and female owners with a greater skew toward men to reflect the market reality.
To get a representative perspective, we recruited owners of Porsche owners (60%) and other brands - BMW, Lexus, Mercedes, Jaguar Land Rover and Audi. In this way, we would get Porsche & competition user POVs. All cars must have been purchased from a showroom in the last 5 years.
METHDOLOGY
One-on-one 60 minute qualitative interviews were conducted with car owners. All interviews were conducted on Zoom. The discussion first centered around definitions of excellence across various services (hotels/airlines/retail)
The bulk of the discussion focused on exploring the progression of making a purchase at a car showroom. There were specific questions on pre-purchase, during purchase and post-purchase touchpoints & expectations.
CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP
All the interesting user stories were compiled and thematically synthesized. We were able to identify 7 discrete stages within the broad customer journey. Our journey map focused on the goals and processes within each stage.
The goals simply represented the task to be acheived and the process was the action taken by the customer or expected from the dealership. Nuances in culture were reported in comparative information areas.
see pdf for clearer view
IMPACT
Nine key recommendations and expectations were compiled across the various stages of pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase. Each action point relates to a certain aspect of the service mechanism at showrooms.
Definitions of customer excellence were integrated with the action points. The statements would serve as helpful benchmarks to evaluate against the current service design and execution plan of Porsche.
REFLECTION
Highlights
Challenges
New ideas
ROSE
THORN
BUD
Observing the cultural differences in the luxury car buyer mindset was truly intriguing - for ex: Egyptian customers had entirely different expectations in terms of service speed and wait times compared to customers in UAE & Saudi
Timely recruitment and scheduling was a major hurdle. Although the project timelines were meticulously planned, it became difficult to recruit Porsche customers from databases provided. Follow-ups and regular communication was crucial to keep everything on track
The presently created journey map information points was useful to draw recommendations. However, additional areas could have been further explored and map - for ex: the anxieties/emotions of the stage or the satisfaction