When Land Rover rolls out new models this fall, it will have a relational database in place for robust marketing support.
The all-terrain vehicle maker’s previous system was a sales reporting tool designed to collect data only on the initial buyer. Since it was organized around vehicle identification numbers (VINs), when a Land Rover changed hands the previous owner’s information was overwritten.
“We’re now able to know who has owned what vehicle and when,” says Cathy Ellico, CRM and e-commerce manager for Land Rover North America.
This was no small improvement: By aggregating the reseller information, the Irvine, CA company found 50,000 Land Rover owners it hadn’t known about. It also eliminated an even greater number of former customers from its files of current owners, but has recategorized these people and will design follow-up marketing efforts for them.
The new system, custom-built using Harte-Hanks Inc.’s Allink Automotive CRM system suite as a base, incorporates warranty and service information and marketing responses from formerly disparate sources to the initial sales record.
Harte-Hanks also provides Land Rover with data cleansing and matching functions. Ellico expects the updated addresses and higher data quality to yield “nice cost savings,” as well as better results from its outreach efforts.
Even in its current consolidated state, the Harte-Hanks system does not include all the data available to Land Rover. For instance, what’s relevant to marketers is knowing what type of repair a given vehicle has had. But it’s not necessary — or even desirable — to record each part number from individual service calls in the new database.
Because of the sheer volume of data associated with any given model, the customer database can’t serve as a data dump for every bit of information about each vehicle, Ellico says.
“We created the customer master file,” she adds. “I can’t imagine how [an all-inclusive database] has been successful anywhere.”
Land Rover still maintains a separate tracking system based on VINs. It contains minute detail on all the work that’s been done on an individual vehicle.
What’s down the road for Land Rover? Eventually Ellico hopes to build a profile that will incorporate the customer’s age, lifestyle and situational changes (such as moving or taking a new job) into a predictive purchase model.
Land Rover also will be using overlay data to promote specific lifestyle events, such as off-road driving combined with luxury hotel packages, to customers based on individual preferences.
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