Initiated aggressive marketing campaigns to support sales targets

Worked together with sale and product management functions to create successful marketing campaigns

When I first started in ZF Group, I was working in a silo mindset with little collaborative initiatives with the sales and product management departments. But I learnt quickly from my initial mistakes and failures that you can only achieve the best possible result for the company’s bottomline if we work together as a team.

That we do not go to a customer only with a marketing proposal but we go there as a company, as a team with a complete business proposal that blends sales, product and marketing offerings. This realisation gave me a motivation to develop a set of marketing brainstorming cards which I often used with my sales and product management colleagues to initiate attractive and very successful sales promotional campaigns. These sales promotional campaigns offered sales discounts and free giveaways supported further by magazine advertisements and in some cases promotional events.

Borrowed POS material ideas from the retail industry to support the marketing campaigns

I was always looking around for new ideas and was constantly seeking unique marketing opportunities to support our sales colleagues. I often borrowed ideas from other industries and modified them to suit the automotive aftermarket. For example POS (point-of-sale) marketing materials such as standees and shelf-talkers were quite common in the retail industry such as in the supermarkets.

At that time the industry predominantly distributed only three types of marketing materials to the automotive service centres: store signages, stickers and wall posters. I encouraged our marketing teams and designing agencies to develop a range of alternative and attractive POS materials emulating the retail industry. Soon our automotive service centres in our Asian markets were carrying life-sized standees and brochure holders in addition to the standard industry offerings, in local languages. These POS materials when integrated with our sales promotions, generated lot of interest and attention from our customers and end users.

Used tactical advertising campaigns in automotive magazines to launch our marketing campaigns

Although I drastically reduced our advertising budgets and focused instead on pubic relations activities, I kept a minimum advertising budget to support our marketing campaigns. In addition, it greatly helped to keep maintain relationships with various magazine publishers for future goodwill.

Although we adhered to our company’s corporate design guidelines closely, we offered a free rein to our designing agencies to create highly localised and unique advertisement copies which greatly complimented our marketing campaigns.