Everyone talking about how to creative customer advocates and we all understand how powerful this is. I think there are a lot of to be learned from the luxury goods industry. Although it is easies to have a customer talking about his new car than his mortgage with the bank.
I am in London this week for meetings and so visit my relatives. After dinner he gave me a ride back to the hotel and during the 20 min ride, our conversation was almost entirely on his Aston Martin. I can see the excitement on his face when he talked about the driving experiences. Just imagine we can make all products with 10% of that excitement. It is not the amount of advertising spend to talk about how good this one, it is about making it great.
So is Aston Martin a great car? Aston Martin was named as Britain's coolest brand this year. It was chosen based its coolness, the judges include DJ and MTV presenter Trevor Nelson, designer Ben de Lisi and Dazed and Confused Editor, Nikki Bidder. All of a sudden, Aston Martin becomes the "It" brand of the automotive world. To be sure, the Aston Martin of the 70's and early 80's had a certain cachet, but it was a boring cigar-smoke-and-over-stuffed-leather-chairs-British-men's-club kind of cachet. Who wants that today? Now Aston Martin is younger than a Mercedes, sexier than Ferrari, sportier than Porsche, manlier than Lamborghini. It is being seen as a true modern sports car.
This is a true brand renaissance, not because massive marketing dollars (BMW failed to steal that James Bond association in consumer minds despite good efforts), but via a great product development team that understand how to go back to the golden days of Roy Salvadori and James Bond, distilled the essence of Aston Martin into something tangible, and then went to work. This is not the fastest car in its category. It is not more luxury. The satellite navigation is from Volvo (pretty bad usability) and its engine from Jaguar. So what makes this car so cool?
They understand only too well that making a car fast is not all that difficult, just bigger engines. Just as Nintendo understands making a faster console is not too difficult either. They started asking "What could be uniquely Aston Martin about this experience?"
Here's what Aston Martin designer Sarah Maynard says about the start button on the new DB9:
It seemed wrong to us that most car starter buttons - the first point of contact between driver and engine - is a plastic button. We wanted something better so decided on crystal-like glass. The Aston Martin logo is sand etched into it. It's lit red when the ignition is on, and afterwards changes to light blue. I think it's a really cool piece of design.
What are they buying? Or does everyone aspire to be James Bond? Aston Martin buyers are buying a statement about who they are. The experience design makes that believable. There is nothing more than that. Isn’t that simple? Emotive factors are often many times more important than tactile attributes, from a customer’s perspective. Although reasons for purchase are almost always a combination of many factors, in most cases customers attribute emotive reasons to be more important as fundamental tactile attributes such as performance and functionality.
