Chevrolet Canada has had to carry a lot of weight over the last seven years. When General Motors rose from the ashes of its 2009 bankruptcy, its Chevy brand found itself having to make up the unit sale and market share gaps left by the discontinued Pontiac brand, which had been approximately 6% of the Canadian new car market (more than double the less than 3% it held in the U.S.).
Since 2009, however, Chevy has yet to return to pre-downturn sales levels in Canada. Data from Desrosiers Automotive Consultants shows just under 150,000 light-vehicle Chevys sold last year, but it was routinely selling more than 200,000 annually before 2009.
A big part of that sales conundrum has been Toronto, or more specifically, the Greater Toronto Area with its mix of young and old, urban and suburban, blue collar and white collar consumers from a range of ethnic backgrounds.
According to Jason Easton, General Motor’s sales and marketing director for the GTA, national marketing messages aren’t proving to be as effective in his region.
“Toronto has been one of the most challenging markets for the better part of the last 20 years: steady marketshare decline, and in recent years, sales volume decline as well,” Easton said.
That was the situation Easton faced when he took the GTA marketing job last August. Originally hired as an engineer doing quality assurance on the assembly line, Easton moved into corporate affairs and communications, bringing an appreciation for data analytics with him.
Having worked with Environics Analytics in a previous role, Easton tapped the agency for what he thought was a straightforward data sweep, saying, “tell me who Chevrolet sells cars to across the country, and where those same types of customers exist in Toronto.” Nationally, Chevy’s market is mostly caucasian, ex-urban, blue collar homeowners who tend to buy a second household vehicle.
“The insight we got out of that, however, is that the national Chevrolet customer doesn’t really exist in Toronto,” Easton said. “The types of people we sell to nationally have a totally different mindset. That was quite a surprising insight.”
Environics Analytics instead provided him with descriptions of seven new consumer groups living around Chevy’s 18 GTA dealerships who were likely to buy their cars. Each of these groups — defined by Environics Analytics’ Prizm5 lifestyle charting system — have clearly defined spending habits, media preferences and personal beliefs that could be used to refine the brands’ aspirational national message into something more relevant on the local dealer level. The “City Renters” group, for example, indexes high on TV, newspaper and direct mail engagement, so dealers adjacent to these communities were advised to buy in those media.
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• A glimpse at Environics Analytics’ new multicultural breakdown of Canada’s urban shoppers
After taking the findings to Chevrolet’s dealers around the GTA in November, Chevy began using the data tweaking its GTA marketing programs.
“We’re ensuring our creative matches that [given] media type. Toronto consumers in general have lower levels of affinity for environmental visuals than, say, folks who live in Calgary or Edmonton,” said Easton. “If you show a pickup truck in a forest or on a mountain, that has lower receptivity than if you show a pickup truck in downtown Toronto at a construction site. While Toronto consumers are progressive environmentalists, actual images of nature are not ones that spurs them into action.”
Activation programs began targeting more specific customer groups. Lots of well-educated, relatively affluent millennials near your downtown dealership? Let them book a test drive in a Chevy Cruze via text, and then to invite them to bring friends or family, pick the music and select some snacks for a “mini road trip.”
Many of the programs birthed by this new focus on consumer analytics in the GTA hasn’t been fully measured yet, as programs are still in market (the “Best Cruze Ever” program described above doesn’t end until March), so Chevy isn’t ready to declare what’s worked and what hasn’t. However, the consumer data analytics approach is now being applied to other urban markets that are similarly challenging: Montreal and Vancouver, specifically. And Easton is not backing down from his numbers-first approach.
“It’s really easy to try to be everything to everybody,” he says, “but the hard part about strategy is making choices. We are making strategic choices to focus on Cruze, generate some learnings, because we have a big launch this year when we bring Cruze to market… We absolutely have to use what Environics provides to make sure we’re hitting the right people in those markets.”
