Melinda Welsh, Chief Marketing Officer & Head Consumer Lending at Chase Auto at JPMorgan Chase will sit down for a “fireside chat” to discuss sales and marketing strategy in a changing, digital-first retail experience.
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00:18
To start things off, we’ll hear from Belinda Welsh chief marketing officer and head of consumer lending at chase auto.
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Melinda has been has has more than 20 years of b2b and b2c marketing experience. And she got her start before internet marketing was really around.
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And before social media was really around,
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in fact, I think she
00:50
started when company websites really consisted of just static pages of basic company information. And we’ve definitely come a long way since then, and we hope to discuss some of those changes that have happened in the market. Would we also hope to address some last tab tools to master auto finance, marketing, and even spend some time talking about marketing, inspiration, innovation, and passion. Please give a warm welcome to when
01:35
I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room full of people
01:36
who do exactly what I do. I’m excited to be here and talk to you. So you our chief marketing officer, as I said, and head of consumer lending at chase auto, the largest bank by auto finance outstandings in the nation. If you could just start off by telling us a little bit about your journey as a marketer, and how That led me to chase and then to chase auto. Sure, sure.
02:04
The interesting stories as you mentioned,
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I predict the internet created digital marketing.
02:10
In my career, I actually
02:11
started off as a journalist and was a reporter worked in publishing and in my publishing company that I worked at a time, we had one internet connected computer. And the task was to just figure out how to put some content on this thing. And so I
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sat there with an HTML book figured out how to get some of our first articles
02:33
published on our internet site and my
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career just took this completely different
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direction. I ended up working for a consulting company doing digital communication, consulting back when that wasn’t even really like a thing. So I go into these huge companies as a 25 year old little business day
02:49
in there, frankly, to help people get things
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on their own their internet and intranet sites. My career evolved into marketing I was in various industries. I came to
03:00
About nine years ago where I ran a division of credit card marketing. I’ve been the CMO for home lending business and then ended up at chase auto. I’ve been here for about five years. And the interesting thing that’s happened over the past year or so is that everything that’s consumer focus, which obviously includes marketing and in our world plus direct lending and product development was combined into one group which is what I managed today so still a heavy focus on marketing but also on product development and how to run direct lending with a p&l involvement as well as my very packed and the fact that I’ve been banging just blows my mind every day after being right on that newspaper. So
03:44
maybe you can just walk us through the how taste audibles marketing department or division is structured now.
03:52
Sure. So um, you know, chases is a big thing. In in total, there are several thousand people could work in Marketing in some way or another, not underpaying. But throughout the whole thing, so we’re divided into one two business. So I obviously run the auto marketing line of business, we do have central resources that all the lines of business have in our disposal, which is something that we’re very fortunate to have things like brand guidelines, press, things like that set at the top of the house, within my own organization. I think every year we reevaluate it. And I’ve done that for the past. Probably five years, I look at where do we need more people and it sort of moves around. But right now, heavy analytics. We have a whole head of analytics who got in line reports into the overall head and analytics for JPMorgan. That group keeps growing.
04:47
Digital
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is a whole group in and of itself, in my world.
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Communications is an interesting one. It’s sort of split between a PR team and my team, but what’s really grown about that group is We have now social
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events, which is becoming actually a more important part of what we do. And other experiential marketing now under one liter, which is new.
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Then we’ve got product development.
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And then campaign management. So
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more project management,
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those are the thing
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that has changed. Probably every year since I’ve been doing this job, there’s been some kind of shift.
05:28
Now, I know one of the newer elements of your role entails managing the p&l for the business. So what are some of the challenges that you’ve faced with regard to that image? Do you think we’ll start to see more auto finance companies go down that path?
05:46
And do I mean I’m thinking in general in the industry,
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I see if
05:50
you guys look at different new jobs that are coming up on senior levels of marketing is seen
05:56
as new role chief revenue officer, but people started to notice thing,
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which is actually sort
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of a combination of the chief marketing officer
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and then with revenue responsibility, and I think that’s becoming more and more common. And it should we should see that reflected in our industry as well.
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And then I think that
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we’re really looking at how does marketing impact the bottom line? I know all of you who are probably interested in that, but I mean, really, how is
06:25
it working?
06:27
One of the biggest challenges for me, you heard my background, I never take a business class in my entire life. I didn’t know you know, I’ve learned them over the years just being in banking, but I didn’t know the basics of accounting. I actually over the past few years and just taking classes on my own.
06:42
And I think I’ve always tell that to up and coming marketers and
06:45
taking business classes. This isn’t just about the creative, right brain side of the world. This is this is data. This is finance, this is numbers and you have to be comfortable in that space. And I think we’re just see that more and more I hope that you guys are seeing That, too, is a challenge for marketers. Because it’s not like we met, you don’t have to do the branding and creative side as well. It’s like, what are we not doing? At this point? We have revenue responsibilities, creative responsibilities, and in this industry regulatory responsibilities, that
07:15
was the biggest thing. Once you have a p&l
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at a bank, I need to meet with the CFPB and the OCC and the rabbit with all the other regulatory bodies,
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pricing legal components. I was like, Oh, this is what the business people do. I’m out shooting.
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But it’s it’s a really nice way to see the whole picture of what’s
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actually supporting. What do you find the are some of the challenges in that, especially for a team? Or do you have members of the team that aren’t necessarily used to that? kind of getting them up to speed? Right, right. I mean,
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we do have a pretty rigorous business case process. So even afterwards doing, let’s say a NATO event, which we do have now gone over Yorkshire guys tend to 1070
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What’s our business case? What can we expect to get out of the return typically in marketing field, oh, they put a big zero in the business case for the
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return, they simply can’t come to us the value that we’re
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creating system event. You know, it’s
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not just an event, how many people don’t expect to get there? How What do we want to be the relationship benefits today at least quantify it somehow. And that’s been a big change from a lot of people on my team, we’ve been doing this for a long time, you can’t sort of get away with having sort of generic marketing out there. And you really have to have a direct impact on the bottom line to the best that we can measure.
08:40
And so what are some tools maybe that you use to try to figure out what those measurements should be? Right? Sometimes they’re soft, you know, soft measures, right? And so how do you quantify that and, you know,
08:53
right, so I got the record into the CMO of JP Morgan, and sometimes you just have to know Right. But then that’s, that’s becoming more and more hard to do to just know if I need X amount of dollars just because I know this is right. But we look at brands left we look at, so that that’s measuring the people who don’t appreciate our brand. And there’s plenty of tools. They don’t have to be separate tools to be able to do that. We look at attendance, we do a ton of survey work, you
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know, things that aren’t measurable. And then of course, there is data, you know, we are in the business and the business results
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coming out as a result of this arm.
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tumors interacting with us more so the combination of parties.
09:41
I wonder, maybe some tools or either you mentioned that analytics in general is, you know, becoming a bigger part of the marketing
09:51
the marketing group, so maybe some insights into how that is evolving on the economic side and
09:58
yeah, I mean, I think I think we all do any marketer
10:02
in the room has some kind of analytics package. If you’ve done
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we have run the gamut,
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you know, some intern sitting here working with Google Analytics
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to
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like the most expensive analytics packages that they probably produce, we have somewhere to chase. And honestly,
10:19
I’d like to estimate as running Google Analytics, I just feel
10:23
like you can look and see exactly what’s going on. I personally don’t think you really need super, super sophisticated
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tools, you need some, and you
10:31
need some in your arsenal. But as long as you’re understanding the consumer behavior, the tools don’t matter. I’m sure there are people in this room that would disagree with me.
10:41
I’m gonna try to ask him later,
10:43
and ask question, but, but I do think just having your finger
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on the pulse of basic
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results is the most valuable thing that you can do. And also testing. The one thing I’ve learned over my 20 years because I’ve never write whatever hypothesis I Adam probably a little bit wrong in terms of what the consumer is actually going to do. So we always go into every campaign and everything we do
11:07
with a testing strategy. And it can be very basic, just a me ABC testing of various concepts.
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And I really
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am always surprised by what we’ve learned. So just be prepared to once you learn what what was coming out and come campaign to then modify it, change it, make it better, and constantly have that, that that flow. And we
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do that with every single thing that we do.
11:33
So can you walk us through maybe either, you know, recent campaigns are, you know, one of those, like sort of that experience, you know, this is what we came up with, right? This is where the idea came from, is what we came up with. This is how we implemented and this is, you know, how we analyzed
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a couple because a lot of what we do, even though
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we’re fairly
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grassroots types of things,
12:00
One thing I’ve learned about this
12:01
industry, which is really interesting, especially on the consumer side is it’s a very emotional industry. People buy cars for all sorts of reasons. And it is the traditional reasons aluminum center is just getting all the hostages private.
12:16
And so how do you tap into that? That passion and we’ve learned, we’re trying to figure out ways to tap into one of those social campaign. Well, what does that actually mean? Have we found
12:29
there’s a snake in a car today? It’s October
12:32
16, or something like that. I can’t
12:35
remember exactly the day
12:36
we didn’t make it up home, but it was this and we
12:39
said, What can we
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do something fun with that, and we spent five honestly $2,000 in this campaign and, and we launched maybe a car day with Chase. And what
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we did was,
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people would submit through Twitter, their picture of themselves and the name of their car and we were shocked to know People actually make the cars into a car. But
13:03
people do.
13:06
We have artists draw renderings of their picture and send them back to them sort of real time. And it was our most successful campaign, one of the most successful social campaigns that we’ve ever had in the past few years. That was just pure, you know, that was me, by the way, as a team,
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and I thought it wasn’t going to work. Fine, it’s $2,000. Go ahead, but
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it really showed that it didn’t have to be
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something incredibly expensive
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or complicated. It just had
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to tap into an emotion that we had. So how do you measure
13:44
how that what that will translate into for the chase brand, right? Like, how do we say, okay, we did that was definitely successful. But now, where is it going to take us?
13:56
So so one of the things for a campaign like
13:58
that, you know, Obviously, the chase
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Duran, who frankly,
14:02
doesn’t really need to chase others help to keep him alive.
14:05
As much as I’d like to think that we do measure engagements and other typical kinds of analytics that you
14:13
would for a campaign. But what
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we really do is we post
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our customer base
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to say, essentially, do you
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know that the chase does auto loans, which frankly, a lot of people don’t? And what what is your feeling about them? Or how likely would you be able to, to consider us and those are the two biggest things
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for me and like
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that, that we would measure, and it has increased over time, for a
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variety of reasons, but I think it’s campaigns like that,
14:41
that really help and then it does translate into business. But because I’ve grown in direct lending, it’s a little harder to tell because the vast majority of our business goes into indirect. So we’re
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really
14:55
looking at consideration awareness when they’re going into a dealership or like more than I plan to ask her to farm
15:01
because our customer.
15:04
So kind of speaking to that, I want to shift gears a little bit. I know that one thing you’re really passionate about is promoting women in the automotive industry, autumn automotive and auto finance, and, you know, empowering within carbuyer. So maybe we can address that. Sure. When I first joined auto
15:27
for four and a half years ago,
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I remember got into my person and they
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settled on them. And now I am
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one with
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a magic wand with an industry partner, and then some internal meetings. And I was the only
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woman pretty much
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all mixed up for the for the last event.
15:48
Did I just step back in time, what just happened here, I really have never experienced that in my entire career. There’s something something’s off here. And you know,
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I just started Doing research about it and really digging in. And, you know, I probably didn’t need to tell people in this row, but women are just nificantly still underrepresented in all of that
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industry. And
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it has gotten better, I have to say over the past four
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years, but you know, I do a lot of speaking,
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especially to younger people to encourage them to come into this industry. It’s intimidating for a lot of people, but it’s actually a really good example women in the audience, I hope you would agree, I think it’s actually a really fun industry to be in male or female. And there’s a really strong network of women
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that support each
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other. And also just product design. So you know, sort of putting our money where our mouth is we’re experimenting some new consumer products and we you really use women as the focus mode.
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You know, what do you feel like is missing the car buying experience and we are
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we’re actually building the products
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and advertising and marketing
16:57
sort of all around that concept. Not that frankly, There’s a little bit of testing we’re doing and like the product just as much as women do.
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So I think there’s probably some some similar
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issues there. But we’re really trying to
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focus on that on that design target. Because there’s just
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there’s still just such a gap.
17:20
I’m kind of looking at some of these questions that are in here.
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One, just how is consideration and awareness, indirect auto? different than other like automatic classes? To combat Yeah.
17:38
So and I don’t mean this helpless. It’s fun
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to be in this room. The only
17:42
people who understand this business so well, but
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still to this day, the majority of people don’t come into the bank and astronomical people
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do
17:52
and we want to be there to serve them if they’re in a branch of mining, we have tools to be able to do that and people can originate along the way.
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But most people don’t. And we recognize that. And that’s
18:05
okay. I mean, we love working with
18:07
with our dealing body. But we do want people to understand that they should at least be shopping around and looking, they should check with your bank, whether it’s chase or another bank, they should understand how to be really important when they’re walking into the dealer about what a good rate would be for them, they should understand that they’re where they are in terms of approval and credit because so many people don’t understand that. So,
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like, as long as we’re educating the
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consumer and they’re making a really positive choice. I’m okay with
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that. Also, a lot of people who have been on multiproduct
18:39
Bank like to have all their financial instruments with
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one company.
18:44
So if that’s something else they’re interested in, we want to help them. We want
18:47
to help them do that. But we also
18:48
understand the reality is can’t compete on
18:51
rates of times and we know they’re going to go somewhere else.
18:54
That’s okay. Just make an informed
18:56
decision. You know, we do every five business
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and how So
19:02
how do you?
19:04
How are you able, let’s say to gauge customers aware of this, you know, the auto like auto raised or you know, kind of how, how much they understood, you know what the product is and what it entails? You know, is that something that you gleaned through the surveys?
19:27
Primarily, you know, we have a whole community
19:30
of chase customers and external customers that we host on a regular basis for all of our products that depend mostly on a lot of great feedback from our bankers and branches. They tell
19:42
us exactly what our customers are thinking
19:44
on a regular basis. So we get a lot of feedback that when I think of really big gaps when someone’s coming into a branch and asking about you know, a lot of money the vast majority of people want to know if they’re, what they’re looking for, and if they’re approved
19:58
and want to rate it. It’s really useful. Almost like a pre qualification
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kind of thing, but that’s
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something you’re really focused on, do we really have to originate the whole loan through the branch or is what people want when they walk into the branch, the pre qualification part and I truly think from a consumer perspective, it’s a better
20:14
experience.
20:16
I’d rather get pre qualified us know what their rate is walk into the door, say a request that they want to chase and then have them do fulfill on finish finish the deal there and then better at it more efficient, cost less frankly.
20:31
And so and then it works really nicely with
20:33
the with the dealer relationships
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we have. So it’s the other big
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piece for the on the consumer side. It’s just that
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education beings, we have people coming in even come
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into our call center or come into a branch and just say I don’t know what they’re actually doing, sir alone. So how
20:48
do you feel that counts? I don’t know what are actually driving
20:53
commercials advisory service. We’ve been waiting for the financing.
20:58
So how do you Take, let’s say that that right and then translated to the market insights instead of being active about getting that information out to consumers.
21:10
We have a whole consumer education training thing on a chase customer.
21:18
If you’ve got one to your brand to notice there’s this big initial condition of consuming it. And so customers can actually proactively indicate what
21:26
they’re saving for and guess what? People are saving for
21:28
a car. So how do we connect that
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desire to save money and that goal based
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approach when when you’re finished? We’re here to do your loan or we’re here to connect you with a dealer.
21:44
What about more broadly taking a step back? inspiration, right inspiration for marketing campaigns, whether in the auto finance space or outside of the sector, you know, where do you look for ideas? Where does your team look? You know, how can the folks in this room, you know, kind of broaden their horizons and say, Hey, this would be a great idea. Let’s let’s give it a shot.
22:08
I’m a project on the auto side, first
22:11
major publication and I bought American or competitive publications, and I really do look at the newspaper
22:17
every day. See what’s happening. I follow a lot of the OEMs
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there’s a few people from OEMs
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the audience, I love seeing what they’re doing with their marketing and, and where their
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budgets are taking them.
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Also, there’s women in automotive physically beaten up your guide, they published on Facebook, Instagram, they’re constantly publishing just stuff happening in the industry is honestly
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one of the best
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feeds that I’ve seen just
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all sorts of things.
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I think I’m a non
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OEM or sorry, non
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auto side.
22:55
There’s a couple of things I’m involved with. There’s something called a C Club, which is Went to and it’s not just the ammos. It’s like director level and above, which is a cross vertical group that has global chapters. I don’t know if anyone’s involved with this. It’s one of the best ways that I get information from an outsider’s industry.
23:15
And we meet every other month. There’s webinars,
23:18
there’s all sorts of things. I mean, it’s not just a CMO club, there’s plenty of other things like that
23:22
actually, is one I’ve sort of really been attracted to. And then at age, I was looking at
23:28
their stuff every day. I mean, there’s just so
23:30
much stuff going on, and what what to do and what not to do is mentoring those stories too.
23:36
And really just keep up with it. I also have someone on my team,
23:39
who all they do is look for things that are happening in the industry that are related to what we’re trying to work on and she compiles it as something out there. Devin is like a junior intern that crushes a fantastic job and we look at that every week. And then they mystery shopper have some history shows.
23:58
They’re working on
24:00
What about some guidelines or guidance for folks in this room? about, you know, when do you use Twitter versus Instagram versus Facebook? You know, sort of how can you figure out what will be your best channel? If you have
24:16
that kind of hair? I’d love to hear it.
24:21
You know, I think
24:23
I think the only way to do it is to have your hands on a lot of them. I can’t say just pick one. I mean, LinkedIn is a world of its own,
24:29
because it’s
24:32
actually a lot of success on LinkedIn.
24:36
Just from from having a sales field and the Field Sales Team actually use it for our sales tool and to distribute content that way. But I think it’s less about the channel anymore about what you’re saying. I don’t know about the audience. But when I
24:50
pay for advertising and Facebook, I just feel like
24:54
what did I just spend my money on? It was so expensive
24:56
and it just never really feel Like I can connect
25:01
what’s happening here to
25:03
actual results. But if we do a really interesting social campaign like that neither comedy, there was
25:10
a movie hardly anything for that. That’s what’s more important than the channel is just getting people’s attention. I personally don’t any close to
25:21
any paid advertising anymore. I’m taking it all out. If we can find creative ways
25:27
to use organic social, that’s great. But
25:33
there’s a question here. Just some examples of the social events. Chase auto doesn’t mention any idea but, you know, maybe something else. And
25:45
what do the social events do for the chase auto brand? You know, how can we measure that?
25:51
Yeah, that’s a really
25:52
good question. Because So, you know,
25:55
I run consumer lending
25:56
and a lot of marketing news comes
25:58
out the same way but there’s also the will be a new space. And we have a huge network of dealer partners that we need to do a different type of marketing for I can say, events and social stuff is where who’s spending most of our time and energy.
26:13
We try newsletters, we tried all sorts of thing. It just
26:16
isn’t business as a people business. I found people want
26:19
to be in person and they want to talk to each other. They’re used to that from their day to day work, especially on the dealer side. And we need to run events and have social events to make it possible. It’s expensive.
26:31
It’s time
26:33
consuming, it’s hard to scale. So we do pick certain things like an ATM do an event every year.
26:40
We have an auto summit every year as well, just for
26:44
executives that we do and diamond counts pretty cool, cool events.
26:50
But I think on a more practical
26:51
level when we do restart user engagement dinners, with people in the industries that will assign it to someone
26:58
who covers template and will help facilitate my marketing team is not that big a champion every single event created to serve dinner
27:07
in a box and give
27:08
them content talking points now handed off to the sales
27:11
team and they can run local events and nothing like that was sort of federated
27:15
out in a more meaningful way.
27:22
Question here
27:25
related to the SAR and you know, to sort of where the auto finance auto sales and auto finance are headed, right, what marketing evidence do you see today that portends car sales through 2019. And are you able to gauge you know, kind of, are you able to see evidence of slowing SAR? And what is marketing
27:51
of the indicator as you start
27:52
seeing a slowdown in response rates are, you know, how can we tie that to the SAR vehicle sales
28:00
So we’ve been, we’ve been saying workers were bracing for
28:04
lower sales for years, and then sort of hasn’t happened. Maybe this is the year before it on our side.
28:16
You know, I don’t want to seem sort of the opposite. You guys are saying this to what?
28:23
We used to have a lot of progress with a private label for several manufacturers. And I know is that all of them are looking for ways to motivate incentives, which a couple years ago, I was like, How much could we you know, what else can we say what else can I was really looking for ways to
28:45
have other types of benefits that earns money off the hood, which they’re very concerned about all
28:53
the OEMs are thinking the same thing. So we’re experimenting with all sorts of things to add value. For example, We work with Mazda. We’re doing campaigns right now to public
29:06
for credit card holders, can they get rewards
29:09
points at
29:10
the time was that because the money is in there, but it’s not taking
29:15
value? pricing people. So I’m
29:17
saying that well, I’m happy to
29:19
talk about that more. That’s probably the biggest
29:24
break is always an interesting discussion, which is
29:31
kind of along those
29:31
lines to question here. What do you think the future is for banks to participate in the emerging economy? Things like subscription services, or, you know, rideshare, or car share? And how do we, how do how does Boeing marketing’s role?
29:51
That’s a really great question and something
29:52
that we have an auto executives who are constantly evaluating
29:56
where do we want to play because there’s so many different places that you can be
30:01
playing right now. We are experimenting
30:04
with subscription.
30:07
Again, not a secret.
30:08
There’s a company clutch
30:10
and working with
30:12
us to try to figure out from a financing
30:14
perspective, like, How the heck do you finance a subscription?
30:22
fraction not
30:22
as much of Chase. I mean,
30:25
I made a pitch about a year ago that we should call Chase, Chase liberty, we weren’t
30:31
quite ready for that.
30:33
But I did give it like a year or two and I feel like
30:36
that’s what we’re getting at is about transportation and, and, and moving in that direction. And that’s like, I guess a great example of marketing like, do
30:44
we need to rebrand ourselves like, is auto is just the hardware. It’s not
30:50
It’s not how people are getting around anymore. And I think as marketers being sort of creative with how he approached that is going to be really necessary. This isn’t I can’t tell you
30:59
that Time marketing right?
31:03
Now it’s important to people anymore and experience and flexibility
31:08
is much more important.
31:12
Looking ahead, we don’t have too much time left. So we’re kind of looking ahead. How would you summarize your main goals for 2019 and heading into 2020? For the marketing side of chase auto, what would you like to accomplish? What would you like, you know, where would you like to see things kind of headed and
31:36
involvement from us right now is, you know, starting to become sort of an overused
31:40
phrase, but customer experience. We are so focused on that at the moment, especially when we’re calling someone out the last mile. So a
31:48
customer has done
31:49
the research, he or she knows what they want to buy. How do
31:53
we make a really
31:54
good connection point between finance the dealer and the consumer and So the consumer walks out says that that was a really positive experience. I’m going to tell people about it. And I’m gonna come back to chase for my next home, because they
32:08
may that’s a positive. That’s really where we’re not as much on what’s our next campaign. And you know, your campaign and the campaign, which it was for years,
32:17
it’s really can we truly improve effects?
32:20
And if
32:22
we can do that surveys and get that kind of response back?
32:28
What is some of the feedback that already you’re starting to see? Or maybe some of the changes that you start to implement into that customer experience, to improve it and you know, to maybe take it to the next level?
32:42
And what people we’ve done a lot of focus groups,
32:45
and what people really want is to feel confident, and it’s just
32:50
that one word, where they’re going in terms of you’re
32:52
so confident and price and comment of you don’t have to have a school
33:00
I’m confident that they’re not going to spend six hours there.
33:03
Those are the three like pain points that people are really trying to to solve in this. And if they can find some way
33:11
or some group that can help them with that they’ll stick with that, even if the price is higher, so in a
33:18
way you’re paying a bit more but they know
33:30
please join me in thanking Melinda for this
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