Solution Marketing & Interactive Digital Experiences

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Bringing a consumer perspective to B2B solution marketing…

Background:

Ericsson had some penetration into the automotive market with their new Connected Vehicle Cloud solution, but wanted to expand their existing partnerships, gain new automotive maker customers and establish their thought leadership in the connected car space. This was 2015, and it was early in the shift to digital services being an integrated and standard part of new cars.

Ericsson asked us for help in positioning their solution and activating a creative strategy for selling it to the automotive industry.

My role: Client lead, strategic lead, project manager, copywriter, creative producer

Approach:

  • Conducted research and interviews to understand the automotive market and how Ericsson’s solution fit within it

  • Studied Ericsson’s existing partnerships, existing use cases and anticipated use cases

  • Audited all existing sales, marketing and communications content

  • Proposed a message platform and a set of creative assets to be used across marketing and sales contexts to bring to life the connected car experience that Ericsson enables automotive makers to provide for their drivers and passengers.

Rather than leading with technical solution details, we showed them how to lead with the end user experience.

To do this, we created a series of films and an ambitious interactive digital demo.

The demo:

We had just two months to build the digital demo to be ready for global industry events. This demo needed to:

  • Be immersive: give the targeted B2B audience the feeling of being in an Ericsson-enabled connected car. Creatively, it needed to go beyond what Ericsson had ever done before to drive sales.

  • Be accurate: even though we were showing use cases that had never been seen before, we needed to show them in a way that was technologically sound, legally feasible, and true to surrounding road and city ecosystem needs and capabilities

  • Be accessible: much of the language of digital services and solutions was still new to the automotive audience, so everything needed to be worded and visualized in a way that any consumer could understand

  • Be flexible across devices, channels and contexts: One size usually can’t fit all when it comes to a digital experience or a single creative asset, but in this case, we needed to build a demo that worked on large event screens and tablets, and in a meeting of one to many, one to few, or a customer exploring on their own.

No one on our small team had ever done anything close to this before. Working with a creative director, I guided all creative decisions from a strategic perspective, wrote all copy and oversaw a freelance design and web developer team. To succeed, we:

  • Put together a very senior, cross-functional steering group that could answer and sign off on everything from a product, sales, marketing and customer perspective

  • Worked in tight sprints: we took on one use case at a time, iterated the creative, tested it with users, got feedback, finalized, then moved to the next use case.

  • Kept a tight grip on timelines and communication with both the busy senior steering group and our long-distance developer team

  • Conducted deep dive research! Along with interviews to determine technical feasibility, we figured out which use cases would be most compelling, possible to bring to life and most relevant to the solution capabilities

  • Worked with live looping video, audio, and motion in a new way, taking cues from the gaming and retail industries and traditional car marketing

The outcome:

This interactive digital demo was supposed to last for about 6 months, which was the expected time until the use cases would likely fade from relevance, since the automotive industry was evolving so quickly.

But this demo stayed in heavy use for 3 years! The Ericsson team said that the longevity was due to the extremely technically advanced story, easy and accessible UX design and creative that was fresh enough to stay relevant for years.

The Ericsson team kept asking for new ways to present the demo, proving that it was indeed relevant for all settings and marketing & sales needs. We created an offline version, a version that could be accessed within the back-end framework of the corporate website, and even took motion graphics, copy and visuals from the demo and repurposed them into social media and sales assets.

Ericsson’s automotive partnerships grew and they expanded to new customers and developed a respected position within the connected vehicle industry.