Vancouver’s Driving Force

Christian Chia no longer wants to be the face of the OpenRoad brand and that’s a shame because he’s just so darn good at it. The 36-year-old president of the eight dealerships in Vancouver’s Lower Mainland is good looking, charismatic, a Formula Renault race car driver and the antithesis of the proverbial car salesman.

About six years ago, Chia took a look at the names in the OpenRoad client database. By dint of being headquartered in Richmond, B.C., he knew the number of Asian clients would be high-according to Statistics Canada about 45% of the population claim Asian descent-but he was stunned when he saw that Asians, specifically Chinese Canadians, comprised close to 70% of all customers.

“We didn’t know exactly what it was attributable to, but from that point on we decided to reallocate a significant portion of our marketing and advertising budget to focus on the Asian and particularly the Chinese population because we thought it was quite easy to identify,” says Chia.

Unlike most dealerships, the strategy behind the OpenRoad Auto Group is to consolidate and grow. Last year the chain-which sells Toyota, Lexus, Honda, Acura, Hyundai and Audi vehicles-had sales of $200 million, employed 320 people and spent more than $1.5 million on marketing.

Chia says an attractive factor about Asian marketing is its relative cost-effectiveness. While Asian marketing-at least in terms of the impressions-accounts for more than half of all OpenRoad marketing, it only takes a 25% hit on the budget.

Chia says his dealerships are able to dominate the Asian market in Vancouver by frequency and focus of the ads, by the quality of advertising and the inclusion of Chia himself in the ads.

“We knew just from the size of our budget we were able to differentiate ourselves from our stand-alone or two-store competition. We are unwavering when it comes to our brand identity-we always rely on our agency for our creative and our communications strategy and the inclusion of me in the ads was a differentiating factor,” he says. “When people see me they don’t really know what I am. They know I’m not 100% Caucasian; but I’m not that Chinese. We thought it could parlay well to our market.”

Initially Chia recorded some of the television and radio ads in Chinese, although he doesn’t speak the language, and after that jerky start the advertising quickly morphed to include his smiling picture in the print ads and his non-speaking appearance on television.

Sony Wong, president and creative director of Hamazaki Wong Marketing Group in Vancouver, OpenRoad’s agency of record, says it was important to introduce consistency across all five car brands OpenRoad sells. In radio, the different brands are brought together with the tag line “Way to go,” whereas in print and television, Chia became the natural icon to tie all the brands together.

“What we wanted was something that was consistent across all the OpenRoad brands and Christian became that symbolization,” says Wong. One of the challenges is that not all of the car manufacturers agree to the OpenRoad brand on the dealerships. For instance, while there is OpenRoad Toyota, the Acura dealership is called North Shore Acura and the Honda dealership is called Middlegate Honda. “While the graphics, approach and the logo is the same across all his dealerships, Christian then becomes the one similarity that is seen across all the different brands,” says Wong. “We also created something we call the creative tool box, which is a set of graphic standards and words and pictures that are consistent across all the brands.” One of these tools is the parade of cars that appears at the bottom of the ads.

“The key for us is to develop an approach that makes the customer understand that by going to OpenRoad they are receiving a certain standard of experience, a certain standard of service and a certain standard of follow-up,” says Wong.

In a television ad, an Asian couple walks into the dealership. They are greeted by the receptionist and two Asian sales reps. When a handful of brochures fall to the ground, the camera pans back to show a smiling Chia picking them up and handing them back to the customer.

The idea, says Wong, is to show that customer service extends all the way from the receptionist to the president.

Jatinder Rai, general manager of Response Advertising, a Richmond-based ethnic marketing company, says in Asian culture there is a huge importance placed on personal relationships and building face-to-face contact. He says putting a face to the brand is a smart strategy.

“One of the things that always works is ‘I speak your language, I understand your culture, I understand your needs and I provide a service that will meet your needs,’ ” says Rai. “It is a very different way of doing marketing, and clients who are mainstream and brand oriented might not understand what I would say is the retail way of communication.”

Surprisingly little information exists on the buying habits of the multicultural car consumer, but what research is available suggests that the Chinese customer is worth the marketing investment.

A 2005 Chinese Newspaper Readership Study by the Environics Research Group interviewed 800 Chinese-speaking and reading Canadians in Toronto and Vancouver. It found that the $44,923 spent annually by the average Asian household surpassed the spending of every other racial or ethnic group-including Caucasians-and exceeded the spending of the average household by 10%. It also found that Asians spent on average $2,156 a year on new vehicle purchases compared to an average of $2,052 for all groups. Another study by the Fairchild Media Group in Vancouver on Chinese media habits found that ownership of cars by Chinese households was at 91% compared to 78% for what Statistics Canada defines as a “Canadian household.”

While other auto dealers target the Asian community in print ads and dealership signage, few take a consistent targeted approach. Most rely on translation of their English ads into Chinese or, as in the case of Mercedes-Benz, placing Chinese signage in dealerships and hiring Chinese personnel. “We provide specific Chinese signage to help them find their way around within our buildings. Our dealers’ personnel-from sales consultants to service providers-would also be Chinese,” says Toronto-based spokesperson Arden Nerling. “In the past we have done national television advertising and had our ads converted to Chinese. More recently, we handle this type of activity through our local dealers.”

Glen Ringdal, president and CEO of the New Car Dealers Association of B.C., says he is surprised there is so little information available on the buying habits of the multicultural car purchaser. He says most of the advertising he sees by dealers are translations of mainstream ads into Chinese, and insists that simple translation rarely works.

Wong would agree. He calls the OpenRoad approach “branded retail.”

“Most automotive retailers don’t give a whit about branding, all they want to do is sell cars,” says Wong. “So that’s why when you go from the national ads all the way down to the dealer level, the quality and the branding goes down considerably. But Christian has taken a very different approach. What he really wants to do is brand automotive dealerships under one umbrella.”

Chia says that however effective his role in developing the brand has been, it’s time for him to step away from being the focal point of the advertising. “I like to think that my job in developing the brand is done,” he says. The next strategy is still unknown, he says, but the evolution of OpenRoad may concentrate more on events and sponsorship-another very important touchpoint for the Asian customer.