How to engage the early market: a dive into electronic vehicles

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes. 

 
00:03 
Dom Hawes 
Welcome to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. This is a podcast about the business of marketing, how to create value, who's doing it well, and how you can help your business win the future. We're going to change things up a little today. Since December, we've looked at marketing disrupt of technologies in a few of our episodes, including two epic shows with the legendary Jeffrey Moore. When we spoke to him about marketing to an early market, he told us about the need to educate. Today we're going to dig into one company's campaign to educate the early market, that is, electronic vehicles. So in a few minutes, we'll meet Neill Emmett (former)head of marketing at LeasePlan, a business that manages over 3.3 million vehicles across 44 countries.  

 
00:55 
Dom Hawes 
But first, did you know that the first electronic vehicle EVer produced was an electronic carriage by Robert Anderson in 1830? In the early 20th century, electronic vehicles also made a brief appearance. Indeed, by 1900, a third of all vehicles on the road in the US were electric. Ferdinand Porsche dEVeloped the first hybrid car, a vehicle powered by electricity and gasoline, just before the beginning of that century. But that's not what I'm calling the early market. Petrol overtook electric and the latter all but disappeared. It wasn't until the late 1990s that electric cars really started to appear. Fast forward 25 years and we are now in the early majority market. And like most disruptive markets, is it the incumbents with their market power that dominate the new field? Not a bit of it.  

 
01:49 
Dom Hawes 
Sure, the big manufacturers have competitive products, but the market for EVs very different. Tesla was recently outpaced by China's BYD in vehicle sales as the largest manufacturer in the world. And we've got new brands like Polestar, Rivian, NIO and Xpeng. even the languishing MG brand has reappeared under new chinese ownership with a range.  

 
02:13 
Dom Hawes 
Of cost effective EVs.  

 
02:15 
Dom Hawes 
So here we are. EVs have crossed the chasm, but if you're marketing to fleet managers who don't get prizes for taking risks, what do you do? And that's what we're going to explore today.  

 
02:28 
Neill Emmett 
Hey, nice to be here. Thank you.  

 
02:29 
Dom Hawes 
This one's been a long time in the making because I think we first spoke to each other just about a year ago, but God's been busy and the market's been tough, hasn't it?  

02:36 
Neill Emmett 
I think longer than that. I think you first probably approached me maybe two years ago, and then we met at the B2B awards in 22.  

 
02:46 
Dom Hawes 
So we did, yeah.  

 
02:46 
Neill Emmett 
So actually that's quite a long time ago.  

 
02:48 
Dom Hawes 
You were in the middle of award land at the time. You'd entered loads and loads of awards and you'd been running a campaign that was hugely successful.  

 
02:57 
Neill Emmett 
Yeah. For us, electric moments. So it's the motivation for when people come on and take on electric vehicle, whether that's a business or a driver. Is it sustainability, environmental or financial? And that motivation behind that drove through to win numerous awards for us. So when we met, were at the b, two b awards, and that night we won two silvers. Very nice. One content marketing, one thought leadership.  

 
03:21 
Dom Hawes 
I think we're going to come on to some of the nuts and bolts of that campaign maybe a little bit later. Let's start by setting some context, though, and looking at you, Neil. Let's go all the way back to the beginning.  

 
03:32 
Dom Hawes 
How did you get into marketing?  

 
03:34 
Neill Emmett 
Long time ago. So I've always been fascinated by the world of marketing. And when I was a young boy, I'd be walking around the house singing advertising jingles. I was an advertiser's delight. And I started in an early sales role, and then frustrated with sales, I was looking for something else. So I started to study marketing in night school and it sort of grew from there. I'm really interested in the psychology behind it, the psychology of influence. And through night school, I then had the confidence to then apply for marketing roles and make the switch. And that was quarter of a century ago and I've never looked back.  

 
04:09 
Dom Hawes 
We've both done one of the Ritson courses. I did the marketing course. You've done brand and you've recently also just done the management module.  

 
04:18 
Neill Emmett 
Yeah, I'm a convert.  

 
04:19 
Dom Hawes 
Okay.  

 
04:20 
Neill Emmett 
I'm absolutely a convert. Anybody I see, I'm selling to get them to take on the Ritson courses. I think Mark's done an excellent job in helping marketing share best practice and elevate the practice as a whole.  

 
04:32 
Dom Hawes 
So in your time in marketing, do you think the way it's done and do you think the business of marketing has changed much in that time?  

 
04:39 
Neill Emmett 
I think marketing's changed dramatically. So when I started, it was print, it was direct mail, and the market's transitioned very quickly. We've seen the whole advent of digital, but as part of that, I don't think we've necessarily seen all the benefits of digital. I think it's become very short term. So anybody coming into the market now is thinking Google, Facebook, paid search, instant responses, and they neglect the value of brand. And I think we've got a bit of responsibility there to bring that back and demonstrate the balance that needs to be had.  

 
05:09 
Dom Hawes 
It's interesting when you think about how it used to because I started also before digital was really a thing. I'm looking at it and wondering whether all this new stuff that's there, does it make the job of a marketer any more effective? Is the work we're doing more impactful? Are we driving more value for our companies because of digital?  

 
05:26 
Dom Hawes 
And I'm not sure we are.  

 
05:28 
Dom Hawes 
I think it's different, but I'm not sure it's necessarily better.  

 
05:31 
Neill Emmett 
I think that's a very fair point. I think it is different. I think the real danger we've got is the whole tactification of marketing. There's less strategy in the thinking, it's more short term. There's a lot more focus on paid search, all that sort of activity. The brand piece, as I mentioned, we need to work harder at that, as advocates of marketing and demonstrate the impact for the organization.  

 
05:53 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, I think it's hard. I heard about a marketer yesterday, not in this country, I'm not going to tell you which country it's in, but a marketer yesterday who's been put into an interim role and is removing all of their brand work, all of their ABM work, all of their longer term activity in favour of very short term performance. I think probably because that company's got a quarter to hit or whatever. And I find it hard to believe that a marketer won't have understood about the waste in digital, particularly in PPC, how much budget you have to have.  

 
06:22 
Neill Emmett 
To make any impact frightening and dangerous. And then if you think about the other side of it, you've got Airbnb and Adidas doing exactly the opposite. They've realised the challenges they've had with paid search and the short term activity with digital, and they're going brand only. So that's the other side of it. Where's the intelligence? I think you've got to think about what's the impact on the bottom line and drive it that way.  

 
06:42 
Dom Hawes 
I think your point you've made about tactification is a really fair one as well. That actually, if you've got a good, robust strategy and your strategy, by the way, ladders up to business, your marketing strategy is laddering up to the business. I think it's easier to keep a focus on what really matters. As soon as you start overtactifying, that's when you start measuring things that don't really matter very much.  

 
07:00 
Neill Emmett 
I think one of the things we do that's been very interesting is we've looked at aligned metrics. So it's very easy. If you thought about, let's say, email marketing, you wanted to drive an open rate. You could change some tactical behaviour there to drive an open rate. Whereas actually, if you realign all the marketing metrics on the overall goal of the business, driving the bottom line, revenue, and then Cascade people's objectives all the way through, then you've got the line up, then you think, well, actually, am I looking at open rate or am I looking at engagement? And what's that stat over time? And it changes the thinking. And that makes a massive difference, being.  

 
07:33 
Dom Hawes 
Able to identify that correlation between the business objective and as you say, those steps of whether it's engagement or opens or whatever, if you can spot that correlation and if you can build a model that you can then go replicate the, well, happy days. I'm not sure many people are there.  

 
07:49 
Neill Emmett 
No, I don't think they are. But I think it's our role to help people. I think it's our role to help people through and think differently about it and bring it all back to the bottom line.  

 
08:01 
Dom Hawes 
As I rend my way through the unicorny forest, meeting all these super talented senior marketers, academics and authors, I realize how important our project is. If your children are listening now, please block their ears. Three, two, one. Okay, adults only. Now, I hope there are no unicorns. They don't exist. And if looking for them is a waste of time, then studying them is even worse. And the same goes for metaphorical unicorns, the billion dollar shooting star businesses that books like to study. You can't learn much from studying outliers, but Neil is a great example of a leader in a business that we can all relate to and therefore all genuinely learn from. We've over tactified, he tells me. We need to realign our marketing metrics on the overall goals of the business. Our role is to help people through and think differently.  

 
08:57 
Dom Hawes 
We're less than ten minutes into this episode, and if you can honestly say that you're on top of all of these three things, well, Chapo, I'd be surprised. Sometimes we need a nudge. And Neil has more up his sleeve. We mentioned the electric moments campaign he ran at the top of the show. I wanted to do a 360 on that campaign, because if persuading people to change is tough, try persuading businesses. Neil's challenge is influencing fleet managers, and here is how he picks up the story.  

 
09:28 
Dom Hawes 
Neil, the electric Moments campaign was the answer I'm interested to identify what the moment of insight was that led you to realize there's an issue that needed a marketing solution to solve it.  

 
09:41 
Neill Emmett 
At the end of 2019, as we emerged from the pandemic, we could see the market was changing. As part of that, electric vehicle sales were single digit and the market was going through a dynamic shift. Government incentives were in place to help adoption of electric vehicles. As part of that, we could start to see benefit in kind, which is a significant tax for an individual driving a company car. So, for example, a three series BMW, so a 320 D attracted 27% benefit in kind, whereas electric vehicle at the time was 0%. So you can see there's quite a big contrast there. And then also the three series BMW, its benefit in kind has risen significantly over the last six years. So there's a significant incentive there and the market's changing, and we wanted to help people lead that change.  

 
10:26 
Neill Emmett 
We wanted to help people through, because we could start to see adoption growing from a business perspective, from a consumer's perspective was still quite low, and were helping those conversations. So my boss approached me and said, well, Neil, we need to relaunch the business. What are we going to do? How are we going to drive this? So I said, well, electrification covers all channels, that sort of zeitgeist piece. So we proposed a big brand campaign, and then we dug into the research. We knew we needed to identify what the problems were, how the market was changing, how we could help people through this challenge. And we received such positive engagement from the entire market that it was evident they needed support. And we created a campaign and shared it positively and generously with the market.  

 
11:09 
Dom Hawes 
Let's dig in. Because electric vehicles are genuinely disruptive. They need a whole different infrastructure. They may look the same from the outside, but we know that there were significant issues. And at the time that you were putting this campaign together, we're talking about a very early market, and an early market often needs education, which is, I guess, what the electric moments campaign was there to do. Not least because there were significant doubts in the market about things like range, the number of recharging points, not actually the national grid, if we all electrified, do have enough electricity to charge. Were you consciously tracking adoption of the technology and mapping that onto the market as well? Or were you taking just a macro look at the market?  

 
11:51 
Neill Emmett 
We were doing both. We were mapping the adoption of the technology. We were looking at takeup in our market versus other markets and looking at what are those trends? So, as you can appreciate in northern Europe, so specifically Norway, adoption of electric vehicles is very strong. They've put a lot of incentives there. So we will look at markets like that to see what the influences were, where the growth is, what's driving this. And then also southern Europe, where adoption is less strong. And then we dug into the local market, what was the truth in the UK? And as part of that, we did a lot of research. We did a qualitative stage, focus groups, stuff like that, and then quantitative to define the problem. And as part of that, the real insight was, you mentioned range there.  

 
12:32 
Neill Emmett 
Range anxiety wasn't the issue, it was change.  

 
12:35 
Dom Hawes 
Okay.  

 
12:37 
Neill Emmett 
The human behind the wheel, the squishy thing. We don't like change. We all struggle with change. So people are putting myths and artificial barriers there that needed addressing. Once we got to the stage to identify really was change anxiety. There was a magic light bulb thinking, hang on a second, we've got a campaign here, we've got story here. We then created educational content. We created tools and guidance. We needed to empower people to make a decision. We needed to help them through what was, oh, how is this going to work? And they put out range anxiety, or there's not enough charge points. We did a separate piece of work on charge points, which is quite interesting. Those that drive electric vehicles think there's plenty. Those that don't drive electric vehicles, lo and behold, believe there's not enough.  

 
13:24 
Neill Emmett 
And that's where as soon as you get into things like that and you open up to people and say, this is the data, this is the problem, they then realize, oh, okay. And we did another piece of research where we looked at. So in our instance, we work in the fleet industry, and fleet managers have a significant portfolio of vehicles in their control where they're trying to then look at the overall cost of ownership and make some decisions. As part of that, we then did some research to say, well, how many fleet managers who are the decision maker had driven electric vehicle? And fundamentally it wasn't enough. So these people influential positions who we're trying to encourage to make the change weren't even adopting it themselves.  

 
13:59 
Neill Emmett 
So we need to then help them and empower them with things like try before you buy and actually say, sit in electric vehicle, what is it like? Can you get to where you wanted to? Oh, yeah, you can. So actually going through this process of education was very enlightening because we gave the way the content generously. There's so much empowerment in the market. And if you think when somebody's empowered to make a decision, it's transformational. They move forward at their own time, at their own speed, but with their own energy, and that's a different piece. Rather than being you must, you must. As soon as they're making the decision, there's a weight lifted from them.  

 
14:43 
Dom Hawes 
From my very earliest days in the marketing and communications business, I've been taught and experienced that if you can create the moment when someone feels like they've discovered something for themselves, you've won their heart, because if they feel ownership, you'll trigger loss aversion. And that is a powerful emotion. Influence is such an important lever and it plays its part too. As communicators and storytellers, our job is to create a trail of breadcrumbs backed up by tools of influence like social proof, consistency and authority. We should aim to enable our targets to make their own discoveries and equip them through the tools of influence with the reassurance and triggers they need to feel and prize ownership. And so back to Neil's story. The starting point for Neil's campaign was a big research project. And throughout the interview Neil refers to research several times.  

 
15:38 
Dom Hawes 
But how many of us genuinely use research to guide our actions? In mid tier B2B land, I suspect not enough. So I wanted to dig a little deeper into Neil's approach. We heard earlier that he started with qualities of research to look at a few of the issues, and he then went into quant. I was interested to hear how long the process took him, the scope of the research, and, well, how he went about it.  

 
16:05 
Neill Emmett 
The piece that took the longest time was finding a good agency and that was valuable. But the end to end research piece was about probably four months. And as you can appreciate, the qual piece took the most time, the focus groups and then digesting the insights to then think, is this a thing? And then work out what were going to take into the quant to then size the problem.  

 
16:25 
Dom Hawes 
And did you have a problem internally selling the concepts of research or the budget for research? In. I think these days often there's pressure internally to spend on things that deliver immediate results rather than setting foundations.  

 
16:39 
Neill Emmett 
Great question. A little. But once I demonstrated the value and the expanded value to the rest of the organization with the insight very pushed.  

 
16:50 
Dom Hawes 
Through very quickly, so the research is repurposed and used to educate internally as well.  

 
16:54 
Dom Hawes 
That's a really good takeaway. I hope Everyone's writing that down and on that.  

 
16:58 
Neill Emmett 
I did quite a few educational sessions as part of this. I did probably six or eight educational sessions with my marketing peers across Europe, and then also to peers around the organisation, because we needed to get the adoption and understanding of electrification right the way through the business. We've then kicked off internally what we would call up charge up cafe. So it's run by an excellent colleague of mine. The charge up cafe is a monthly update where we're talking about all things electrification to help the business rise up through this.  

 
17:27 
Dom Hawes 
I'm sure this is probably going to be afraid to change territory. I'm not an EV driver. One of the things certainly we need.  

 
17:33 
Neill Emmett 
To work on that.  

 
17:34 
Dom Hawes 
I know we do, yeah. But I'm thinking from a fleet point of view, do the economics change with electronic vehicles? I mean, maybe from a product marketing point of view, if you like. So the lifetime value of a diesel car is reasonably easy to predict, and if a component in an engine goes wrong, you fix it and they have long lives. A large part of the value of an EV, I believe, is the battery. But once they are dead, are they dead? How does the change in the drive affect the lifetime value and the economics of the model?  

 
18:04 
Neill Emmett 
There's two questions there. One will cover lifetime value and the other one will cover off the battery piece. So we did another research piece in that where actually people's concerns over battery life is far bigger than actually the reality.  

 
18:16 
Dom Hawes 
I'm raising my hand in the studio.  

 
18:18 
Neill Emmett 
Honestly, and that's no surprise. We do see battery lives go on and on. There's Teslas doing sort of 300,000 miles and greater. So actually there is a little bit of degradation, but it's not as much as people are worried about.  

 
18:31 
Dom Hawes 
Like an iPhone.  

 
18:32 
Neill Emmett 
No, not to the same degree. And there is a little bit of impact on range based on cold weather. So I've recently come back from Scandinavia as part of that. They're talking about significant impact on battery degradation, but not to the degree it's more usable in the journey you're doing, not long term. On the other question you were asking about whole life costs, we encourage fleets and drivers to think about the total cost of ownership, the whole life cost of the operation. So you've got the cost of the vehicle, you've got taxation, so road tax, company car tax, benefit in kind. What's the cost of your fuel? So either that's energy, so your electricity or petrol or diesel, and you're working through these pieces. The reality is pre pandemic, very favourable from electric perspective.  

 
19:23 
Neill Emmett 
Then through the pandemic we saw petrol price and diesel prices rise dramatically. Sometimes we got to parity, but it continues to be very attractive, and it continues to be up until benefit in kind for an electric vehicle, which is increasing up until we get to between 15% to 20% benefit in kind, it's still very attractive and cost effective to drive an electric vehicle.  

 
19:43 
Dom Hawes 
Cool.  

 
19:44 
Dom Hawes 
So I just want to understand one of the P's obviously is important price how does the price compare between a fossil fuel vehicle and an EV?  

 
19:52 
Neill Emmett 
We're getting to an attractive point of parity currently. So if you think about a golf VW golf at the moment versus the comparable electric id three id four something like that. Price parity from a purchase perspective is pretty good. So then you work through the rest of the total cost of ownership of electrification versus fueling. So whether you got petrol or diesel, you work this through, then you put your taxation in. It's still more attractive to get an electric vehicle.  

 
20:16 
Dom Hawes 
Price is something we often mention on this podcast, but because the setting of price so rarely involves marketing input in many companies, it's not really something we've majored on. But here's a really good example of how marketers can influence pricing discussions when the sale moment comes by building a frame for pricing in early. In this case, Neil contends that the price of the vehicle on its own shouldn't be a deciding criterion. It's the total cost of ownership that matters, not just vehicle cost or fuel cost. Apple resellers often play the same game. In Apple's case, the hardware is probably more expensive than a similarly featured pc, but because they don't cost as much to administer, they live longer and have a high residual value, the total cost of ownership is lower.  

 
21:05 
Dom Hawes 
Now, I'm not saying that the cost calculations are the same for EVs they are for Max. They're almost certainly not. But the pricing frame, well, that's the same look at the total cost of ownership. Now. For most of my life I've beliEVed that I was an early adopter, and in certain categories I think I probably am, especially around electronic technology and software. But when it comes to cars, afraid to say I'm still driving a diesel, a lower emission one, but it is still burning fossil fuel. And me being a mid to late majority buyer in this market only dawned on me as our conversation unfolded. And you know what? It hurt a little too. Being early into thing. It's kind of part of my id, or at least I thought it was.  

 
21:48 
Dom Hawes 
And I wondered how many other people there were like me who talked early adopter but adopted late.  

 
21:54 
Neill Emmett 
We did a piece of research for World EV Day in 2022, where we looked at mobilizing the next generation of electric vehicle drivers, we dug into another a number of elements. So again we did qual and quant, but we found here there's a difference piece in age. So the younger generation are more motivated by electrification. They sort of like the model of have your iPhone on a monthly contract. They like the technology in electric vehicle, but they can't afford it and they don't quite understand how to sort of service it. The older generation understand electrification, but they're not interested. They like what they've done with a petrol or diesel vehicle. They can afford an electric vehicle, but they don't want to take it. They understand the maintenance. So we do see this divide, and we called this at the time the demographic divide.  

 
22:40 
Neill Emmett 
So please don't beat yourself up from that perspective. You can still be an early adopter within that and embrace it, because I do think it's an exciting piece. This is a piece we see across the UK.  

 
22:50 
Dom Hawes 
I've been reading Decode actually, the decision science book, and we've got Phil coming onto the podcast to talk to us about decision science. And it's interesting using this as a lens to look through that. So I've built a mental model of car ownership in my head, actually. I don't buy new and I don't lease. I buy second hand, hold and sell second hand and then refresh with a nearly new. I just need to change that model, I guess in my head a that's broken because I've been buying diesel, second hand selling diesel. So a that model is broken because I need to do something that's cleaner. But maybe the time is now to think about renting it. I don't feel the need to own my telephone. So as you say, why should I feel the need to own a car?  

 
23:26 
Neill Emmett 
An electric is ideal for that. You remove the uncertainty on the market, you've got certainty on your spend on a monthly basis, and actually it's an ideal time.  

 
23:35 
Dom Hawes 
I think we've articulated the problem and I seem to embody it. It's people, it's that fear of change. So your job is to educate an early market and encourage people to sample. Let's move on to the planning stage. Your research, we've talked about it a little bit already, but what were the outputs and the outcome of the research that gave your kind of aha moment?  

 
23:56 
Neill Emmett 
The output? The research was really good. So when we did the playback to the organization, one thing I was really keen on was to bring the data to life and bring it to life visually, when we had that clarity of communication to the team, it was, yeah, a sort of arresting moment. You could see people in the room sort of sit back and then sort of look sort of wistfully at the ceiling and then look back and then really come in with really sharp focus. What drivers told us they wanted was they wanted to know the pros and cons about electrification. They wanted to know the costs and benefits, but they wanted in a transparent manner.  

 
24:31 
Neill Emmett 
Now, it's not rocket science, but what we saw at the time in the market was a lot of either positive, positive sales views where actually when somebody's making a decision, they want to know the pros and cons. So I always say, if you're a driver and you're a photocopy engineer, for example, and you're going from land's end to John O'Groats, you don't want to take an electric vehicle. It's not going to work for you because you've got a weight there and you've got a fair distance to cover. But as part of that, I think it's a right thing, right purpose, right time. And that's where were helping people through the process.  

 
25:05 
Dom Hawes 
It's interesting also because I guess you would have been a very. Well, you still are a very authentic voice in the market because you're not a manufacturer. And so presumably you're representing multiple brands and you're staying with your customers for the lifecycle of the product. An ideally positioned platform for thought leadership.  

 
25:22 
Neill Emmett 
Absolutely. And through that, were able to speak with a confident voice, but the impartial element was very important at the time. We're an independent funder. As part of that, it's very important to show, as I said, the pros and cons, costs and benefits, but show whole of market. What did this thing look like?  

 
25:40 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, speaking of whole of market, you can't launch a product to everybody. Tell me a little bit about your process of kind of defining, sizing and then segmenting the market.  

 
25:48 
Neill Emmett 
Yeah, great question. So all of this segmentation, targeting, positioning, the whole focus for us was what element of the market was appropriate at the time? For us, it was fleets, because there was a business perspective from benefit and kind tax, but also there was an audience from a consumer perspective that we couldn't ignore. So as part of that, we used mosaic. We overlaid that on our data and we found prestige positions. So think married couples earning over 75,000 pounds living in four bedroom homes, like with two. With two cars. And one of them was likely to be electric.  

 
26:20 
Dom Hawes 
Okay.  

 
26:20 
Neill Emmett 
So you can start to very distinct demographic there that we could clue in to our targeting and our digital activity, which gave us very clear focus.  

 
26:30 
Dom Hawes 
In our pre production meeting. Neil, you told us that you used the benefits ladder to understand the emotional benefits that your service is going to bring to users. Can you explain the benefits ladder a little bit more to me now? And also why you decided to take that particular approach?  

 
26:45 
Neill Emmett 
Yeah, that's a really good example. So we talked earlier about the mini MBA from Mark Ritson. It was something I learned then. The benefits ladder enables a marketeer to move simply from product attributes through product benefits up to emotional benefits. And Mark would advocate, the higher you can get up the benefits ladder, the better. It's one reasons why you see so many adverts with a sort of emotive nature. So one thing I was very conscious of was to think, how can we drive an emotional element, this. What's that sort of higher level that we can take this to? And then that's when were going through the creative process. We came up with this concept of electric moments.  

 
27:24 
Neill Emmett 
It's a moment of sort of that light bulb moment in your head when you think, actually, this could work for me, whether it's environmental sustainability, whatever that piece is. And it gave us a really wide lens for storytelling as well.  

 
27:38 
Dom Hawes 
And the flip side of emotion, of course, is motivations and goals. And most people, most sensible people have at least some goal of having a better footprint. So this is a pretty easy step, I guess. Let's fast forward a little bit. You've done your research, you've done your segmentation, so you know exactly who you're going to target. How did you decide then how you're going to reach them? Talk to me a little bit about campaign planning.  

 
28:01 
Neill Emmett 
The campaign planning was quite interesting. We found ourselves at a bit of an intersection. We had a good budget and were trying to work out. We identified our business audience and our slightly smaller consumer audience, and we needed to get to drivers as well. So as part of that, we're having the conversation, we'd say, well, we could create a big advert, we could do a significant campaign across a number of channels. And I got to a sort of point and sort of paused. And I was thinking, something doesn't quite sit right. Something doesn't quite sit right. And I was thinking about, how do you get long term engagement in somebody's head? And it's from repetition and it's from a positive moment.  

 
28:41 
Neill Emmett 
And then I was also thinking about, if you think about through your early career and your school career, who's made a really big impact on you. There's probably a teacher who you can say, that person taught me so much. It was that kind of thing that I thought, hang on a second, we can skin this differently. And then we took a very conscious turn and we invested heavily in the education because that was driven by the research. Had we not done the research, I'd have done a big above the line campaign and we probably wouldn't be sitting here now. So we consciously took a different turn. And that second turn, we created a series of videos with Robert Llewellyn's fully charged YouTube channel. We were showcasing the steps to go electric, and we backed this up with a series of case studies.  

 
29:21 
Neill Emmett 
And we called the case studies people like me. We needed to make it relatable. These people were sort of experts or influencers within the world of electric. They'd been driving for electric for a few years and knew the pitfalls. And again, from our research, we wanted to make it authentic. So we showed the pros and cons. We put a little bit of gentle humour in there, but we made it supportive and educational. And then we underpinned it with a lot of tools. So you can see there's a very conscious turning there that we wouldn't have taken had we not really dug into the research and the problem.  

 
29:54 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, it's interesting, the kind of media partnership with Robert Llewellyn and being on YouTube, where the numbers can get pretty big, but the content's a hell of a lot more sticky than it know. Obviously, it's sticky. It's got an infinite longer shelf life than an ad, which once it's done and you have to keep paying to repeat. So.  

 
30:10 
Neill Emmett 
Absolutely.  

 
30:10 
Dom Hawes 
That's really cool. That's really smart. So we're going to link those videos, or we'll link to some of those videos on the show notes so you can go straight to the platform you're on now if you want to. And I'd wait till the end of the podcast, obviously, but you can link and go and see some of those videos. At what stage, then of the planning did you build measure techniques in? Were they built in right from the start? Or is that something that evolved as you developed your plans?  

 
30:31 
Neill Emmett 
I think some of this evolved organically on the way through, but ultimately were looking about how do we get more vehicles out the door, how do we get more electric vehicles, and we increase that penetration. But also as we took a bit of a turning in our process. As I mentioned previously, were very conscious to actually think about what are our overall metrics. So there was a brand metric in there, as you can imagine, at the top, but there was ultimately vehicles on fleet vehicles sold, which was our ultimate metric. That's why we're here It’s the bottom line. 

 
30:57 
Dom Hawes 
Sure. And someone's actually got to do that selling. So maybe we can just now go through the campaign and look at how you managed to engage your colleagues to effectively create the buyer journey. How did you roll this thing out and how did you work with your colleagues to present that sort of single brand to your customers?  

 
31:13 
Neill Emmett 
As part of this, we always do a big campaign launch. So I think it's really important to bring the business on board, show them what you're doing and explain how does it work. We started off, we delivered some pr into the market, which was a research based pr. So we created a lot of awareness to start with, B2B, B2C and trade. Then we launched channel by channel. And we're working through this to make sure audiences had the right content in front of them at the right time. We had an indirect groups for brokers. We gave them tools and guidance that they could use on their own websites. Large corporate team as part of the corporate team, we then had shared the tools and guidance with large fleets to then help them make that decision.  

 
31:52 
Neill Emmett 
And then for consumers and the small business audience, we put content on our website to then help them understand. And then concurrently, the content we put out with fully charged was going out EVery two weeks throughout that period. We then also built a significant spine of educational content, again free to the market because we want to create a go to resource. And then that saw significant uplift. So we've really got a multichannel campaign there, but supporting multiple sales channels.  

 
32:18 
Dom Hawes 
And all of those things are in your control. Apart from the first one, the one where you started. PR is notoriously difficult to get, or certainly you can't guarantee it, right? Because you're always at the whim of a journalist finding what you're saying interesting.  

 
32:30 
Dom Hawes 
You got national coverage, didn't you? Yeah.  

 
32:32 
Neill Emmett 
Early in my career, I found that doing research based PR gave me spectacular results. And I've been lobbying the agencies to take this on for a while. So when we then found a moment where we've got a big campaign to run, that was really great opportunity. So I talked a lot about research here. This is a separate piece of research. As part of that, we then identified an adjacent topic that would align to the campaign. And were looking at, as part of the market, what was influencing people to take a more sustainable life. Whether this was solar composting, lo and behold, drive an electric vehicle. And as part of that, the reality is, our research found across the UK is people are influenced by the community around them, so their neighbours. I mean, no surprise.  

 
33:17 
Neill Emmett 
You drive down the street, you see somebody next door, oh, you've got a new Tesla, you've got a new polestar. Where did you get that? And I'm a big reader in people like Robert Cialdini.  

 
33:29 
Dom Hawes 
All of that piece, social proof, I'm just there exactly laddering through my mind.  

 
33:34 
Neill Emmett 
And as part of that, if you've ever read by another author, whose author, whose name forgets me, contagious, how ideas spread. As part of that, I remembered that there was a concept in there about people in America and how they were influenced. Let's say you're a lawyer and you see somebody's driving a BMW. Well, lo and behold, you get a BMW, but you're different. They've got a blue one, you've got a green one, you're the same, but you're different. So you're influenced, but you're doing something else. So we built this campaign and we called this concept keeping up with the greens, because there's that, keeping up with the neighbours. And we then released it end of August, so just before the campaign was going to start. And we got coverage in six nationals, including the sun, the Express and the Scotsman.  

 
34:14 
Neill Emmett 
And were lucky enough to then get it syndicated, so it then was picked up by 157 regional titles. So it was spectacular. We then took another piece. So I mentioned we're working with Robert. Llewellyn's fully charged. We then paid Robert to do a radio day, so then to take the content onto radio. And then from that, we got 5.5 million estimated listens. And overall, that overall campaign for us is 1.1 million. Had we spent that in advertising? Now, I didn't spend anywhere near that, as you can imagine, but that reach was spectacular when we won the CIPR business and corporate campaign of the year. With that.  

 
34:55 
Dom Hawes 
I'm not the greatest fan of metrics like advertising equivalents.  

 
34:58 
Dom Hawes 
The PR industry has been using them for decades.  

 
35:01 
Dom Hawes 
For me, the list of coverage on its own is probably enough without the.  

 
35:05 
Dom Hawes 
Need to put a monetary value to it.  

 
35:07 
Dom Hawes 
But that's an aside. What I love about this story is the main audience is B2B, the fleet managers. And sure, Neil is also targeting his prestige positions segment.  

 
35:17 
Dom Hawes 
Whoo. That's a tongue twister, which is a.  

 
35:19 
Dom Hawes 
Personal leasing market, not a business one. But the research, the campaign design, the execution is perfect for achieving good press coverage. So here you have a business targeting other businesses through consumer news channels. Brilliant. We know the power of fame and we've already talked about the power of discovery. And when people read about a business.  

 
35:42 
Dom Hawes 
For the first time in a paper.  

 
35:43 
Dom Hawes 
Although it's contrived, although it's the journalist that made the discovery, we still feel ownership. I can even picture a fleet manager taking press cuttings into work to show his or her teams. And they'll say something like, hey, look what I found. They've taken ownership. Now, we don't all have the raw materials to achieve the same thing, but PR, to my mind, is highly underrated as a tool of influence in B2B, in this case, Neil led his campaign with PR and awards aside, his business saw the kind of boost we're all seeking, and that is value creation right there. Now, at this stage, Neil gave a shout out to two of his team members in the full recording, unfortunately didn't make the edit. Rebecca and Jamie, if you are listening, you are Neil's campaign heroes.  

 
36:30 
Dom Hawes 
Let's now get back to the studio to talk about the future.  

 
36:36 
Dom Hawes 
Well, it's that time of the show now where we move on to start thinking about the future. We're all thinking about the future because today we're talking about being green, but I'm thinking about specifically the future for marketers rather than the future for the human race. We're in an interesting time at the moment from my point of view. I think in this country, although we're going to have a change of regime, I think both parties are so business friendly these days and so middle ground, that actually, although the party is changing and there'll be some uncertainty, I think. I think we'll find towards the autumn and winter, people stop making decisions as much as they're making them at the moment. But I think we'll recover from that pretty quickly. It's not like there's going to be a big ideological change.  

 
37:13 
Dom Hawes 
So I'm hoping that we can just continue the business as very fair.  

 
37:17 
Neill Emmett 
Very fair. I think as part of that, I'd really like to see if there is a regime change, a bigger drive for sustainability. What do we do, what legacy we're leaving? How are we supporting climate change? We saw Rishi early in the year row back on some of his targets, but some of the things like the zero emission vehicle mandate still stand there. So whilst he's changed some bits. He hasn't changed everything. So it'll be interesting to see what labour bring through as part of this. If they get know there's going to be a tight tussle there.  

 
37:45 
Dom Hawes 
Do you think so?  

 
37:45 
Neill Emmett 
I think there's going to be a tight tussle, but I think you're right. From a business perspective, I think they're both business friendly. But I would like to see more climate friendly because if you think about this, none of us are getting out of this alive, none of us are getting out of this life. So we got to then think about what are we leaving behind, how are we making this a better place? And if we're not collaborating to help make a difference, I think it's going to be a tough environment.  

 
38:06 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, so what about the economy? It's been a bit rocky over the.  

 
38:10 
Dom Hawes 
last twelve to 18 months and we've.  

 
38:11 
Dom Hawes 
now technically entered recession. We haven't been there till now technically, but it kind of has felt like a recessive market to many, hasn't it? And I think there's a danger that we will fall into like a proper deep recession unless we're careful. Neil, what do you see from a marketing point of view? What do you see in the twelve months ahead?  

 
38:29 
Neill Emmett 
So I think we see some of the big four are putting cautiously optimistic views out there. I'd like to see that a little bit more optimistic because the danger is if we all remain cautious, we'll end up in recession very quickly because everybody's looking at the next person to make a decision. So there needs to be some bold decision makers and if you think about the other side of it, during recessions when some of the most exciting tech organizations historically have come forward. So I'd really like to see some bold moves and some brave moves to actually say this is where I think the market's going to go.  

 
39:01 
Dom Hawes 
Society now, one of the benefits I'm going to get probably cancelled here, but one of the benefits of having a slight downturn is all that crap about culture war. If you remember, like just before COVID that was mental. That's all gone. But from a kind of society and cultural point of view, how do you think where we are now and this year ahead, how do you think that's going to affect how we market and communicate to people?  

 
39:25 
Neill Emmett 
We're getting more sub niches. I think there's sort of fragmentation in social media. I think we've got sort of some micro targeting within there. There's a danger if we don't manage that well because as a marketer you want to target a niche. But we did potentially a bit of sophisticated mass marketing as well as part of that. But comes back to my point in education, there's no planet b. So I come back time and again to this piece on sustainability. So even as the market changes, even as we do get focus on niche, we've got to come back and think about what is our ultimate purpose. There's a danger that marketeers get full with art, with purpose led, and actually it doesn't run authentically through the business.  

 
40:06 
Neill Emmett 
There are a number of large brands, and I'm not going to name check them, who talk about sustainability, who talk about purpose and it's rot. That's the danger I would say.  

 
40:15 
Dom Hawes 
But people have got amazing bullshit detectors, I hope. I think they have. I think brands that do that stuff get called out in the end and it damages them probably for longer than the small bit of gain they got. But you've also, in the middle of that sentence, you've just given us the title for the podcast, There is No Plant B  

 
40:30 
Neill Emmett 
I think that's well used. I would say your title is None of us is getting out this alive.  

 
40:37 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, I quite like there's no planet b anyway, technology, you've hinted at it already. We can't be on a marketing podcast without talking about AI, although it's the thing EVerybody is talking about. And of course we extensively use it ourselves in the production process with this podcast. What opportunities are you seeing AI bringing to marketers across the board? Doesn't matter whether agency in house, where do you think the opportunity is over.  

 
40:58 
Neill Emmett 
The next six to twelve content curation, automation and scaling. But it needs to be heavily, needs to come back to my original point on research. What's your focus on what you're trying to achieve? AI is not the solution. AI is a way to get you there. If you think about some of the stuff that Jim Collins used to talk about where people would say, oh, technology is the solution. The same thing here, AI is the solution only if you've got the right problem, articulated with the right focus and the right targeting, then it'll grease the wheels.  

 
41:31 
Dom Hawes 
So there you have it folks. Cold hard facts, insights, takeaways and tips straight from the unicorny's mouth. I mentioned this earlier at least once, but what really struck me as Neil's story unfolded is how central research is to his decision making and planning. In the interview I pushed him a little bit on costs, but understandably some things are commercially confidential and while I might like to think I channel Jeremy Paxman. I'm probably more like pac man walking around a maze of information, picking up nuggets. But we got some great nuggets today. Research threaded through the various parts of his story, and although we didn't dwell too much on it, did you hear how he repurposed the analysis and results to drive internal communications, too? If you need to educate your market to take real leadership, you need to educate your people too.  

 
42:25 
Dom Hawes 
In this case, where he had such a clear observation about who to target, what their objections might be, and how to overcome them, getting the whole team up to speed, that probably made all the difference. The electric moments campaign was designed to spark a moment of discovery, of inspiration, of realization in the target market. that electronic might be right for me. And I'm sitting here right now having just finished the interview, and I'm thinking it might be right for me too. The campaign and the approach is a nudge. It's not a full frontal assault. And that makes it easy to digest. It doesn't trigger my fight mechanism. Lots of things do, by the way, this one didn't. Neil also used research to drive press coverage to launch the campaign. A natty title, keeping up with the greens, backed by some solid and regionalized statistics.  

 
43:16 
Dom Hawes 
That's a gimme for hard pressed journalists. And this was flawless execution. So what's my doggy bag? What's my takeaway, research we all talk about it, but how many of us do enough? Be honest. Do you? You've been listening to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nicola Fairly is the is producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor, and Ornella Weston and me, Dom Hawes, are your writers. Unicorny is a Selby Anderson production.