By Michael Perschke
Head, Audi India
The Audi made inroads into India much earlier than anyone would guess –way back in 1985, when Ravi Shastri won an Audi for his performance in the Cricket World Championship in Australia. It has been a wonderful journey for the company ever since. Many incidents come to mind with regard to this unconventional market. Let me recount the two most memorable ones.
I had gone to the Chennai dealership opening on January 10 this year. Early that morning, someone walked in to check out a brand new Audi R8 V10 parked at the showroom. The car - a white one - had been brought to the showroom barely a couple of hours back. The man pointed to the car and said, “I’ll buy this one. I will pay Rs 1.4 crore and take it with me!”
The same evening, I handed over the keys of another car, a new R8 V8 worth Rs 1.2 crore, to a 19-year-old boy. It was a gift from his father, a metal trader. All my marketing strategies would have completely failed to target these two customers, because I wouldn’t find them in any marketing research results. People who are completely off any marketing strategy radar actually bought cars worth more than Rs 2.5 crore!
On another occasion, I handed over the keys of an Audi A8 - only the third sold until then - to a 19-year-old in Pune. That boy was already owner of a Mercedes S-Class and a BMW 7-series and the Audi A8 was his third car. That evening, I cracked a joke that Ravi Shastri had told me - anyone owning three such cars can be called an MBA (Mercedes, BMW and Audi). I told the boy that he had got his MBA at age 19. In India, the cars you sell to the target audience and how you reach out to them is very different. You can do the classical above the line (ATL), below the line (BTL), social media, etc., but the key marketing tools for me have been ground activations - go where the customers are. The second strongest marketing element, according to me, is word of mouth. Of course, some readers representing agencies might not like this. In my business, word of mouth is comparable to any other marketing measure as somebody who loves his Audi A7 will talk crazily about it to all his friends. And more often than not, his friends themselves would have cars of the same class. This is guaranteed to zip past any marketing measure right to the point of sale, and would have greater impact than any advertisement run in print or broadcast.
