After a learning curve, I realised that the returns on investment on marketing activities are much higher when you co-sponsor your customer’s marketing activity then building something totally from scratch in your headquarters office.
With this realisation, I immediately reduced Singapore-initiated and centred marketing activities and instead encouraged my marketing team to invest in qualified marketing activities of our key customers in the region. This street-wise marketing strategy energised the local customers who collaborated with the ZF Group to create many successful local sales promotions and activities.
Customer Support
For example key distributors in Hong Kong and Taiwan created their own local sales promotional campaigns and we supported them with advertising support and giveaways. In Indonesia, our key customer needed our sponsorship to go on a road show to ten Indonesian cities. A Singapore customer needed sponsorship to take part in an automotive trade fair and a Thai customer needed support to organise a technical training. In this way we managed to amplify our marketing and branding activities many fold across the region.
End Consumer Activities
I also initiated the first efforts in the automotive aftermarket industry to start sponsoring and supporting local car clubs activities. Examples of the such activities are sponsoring defensive driving courses in Singapore, organising test drives in Malaysia and supporting the largest convoy of European cars in Indonesia organised by the local car clubs. These opportunities created an efficient end user direct marketing platform for the marketing team to position its branding messages at a fraction of the effort.
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