At the recent Canadian International Autoshow in Toronto, I had a chance to talk to Jennifer Barron, the new Director of Lexus in Canada. Jennifer is a very interesting person—with Lexus since 1990, she has played an instrumental role in designing the brand’s customer experience. Now, things have come full circle and she’s running the place.

Jennifer talks about what differentiates Lexus in the crowded luxury market and what it will take to compete in 2016 and beyond.

At the recent Canadian International Autoshow, I had a chance to speak with Cyril Dimitris, Toyota Canada’s new Vice President of Sales. The former Director of Lexus and Scion Divisions (among several other previous positions with Toyota), Cyril brings years of automotive brand expertise and deep understanding of the automotive customer to his new role.

In our conversation, Cyril talks about changing customer expectations, how Toyota is adapting, the U Squared concept, and the recent decision to nix the Gen-Y oriented Scion brand. 

I get worried sometimes when I hear manufacturers talk about their goals. Obviously everybody in the dealer network needs to know where the goal posts are, but sometimes the goals can be so unrealistic that they are actually setting dealers up for failure. Is it reasonable, for example, that a brand will jump up 15 spots on JDPA or NVCS? Maybe not, especially when few resources, aka – money and management expertise, are dedicated to achieving the goal.

Here’s a few more thoughts about goal setting in 2016. Let’s be practical about this. 

At the recent Automotive News World Congress in Detroit Robert Pietsch, Director Sales, Auto and Tech at Twitter, quoted some statistics which I found fascinating. 140,000 people per day tweet that they are going car shopping and most mention the brands they’re looking at. However, only about 5 percent receive a response back from the brand.

Live from the 2016 Detroit Auto Show! 

In the first installment of our automotive blog series #autobond, Chris Travell talks about three things that you should consider for building brand loyalty in 2016.

Have you ever considered your product a commodity?

Perhaps not—and we wouldn’t recommend that you do so.

But you must be prepared for customers who may. Like it or not, a mortgage is a mortgage, a car is a car and a hotel room is a hotel room, and your product is one of many.

Regardless of your sector—be it banking, retail, automotive, health care, or something else altogether—your customers make decisions about what they purchase for a variety of reasons. The product itself is increasingly just one of many influencers; the brand may contribute equal weight in the decision-making process.

More and more, aligned values and customer experience are key choice differentiators.

“The Butler did it, in the Service Bay, with unmatched listening skills”

While you may not have played the board game Clue recently, there is compelling evidence that great consumer experience begins with an insight followed by clear and sometimes surprising action. An insight, in our opinion is a fact married to intuition. We used this insight to tackle the need for improved hospitality in the automotive sector and offer an experience that would lead to a higher rate of satisfaction and therefore greater advocacy.

In fact, loyalty increased by 17% for consumers who were completely satisfied with the service on their previous vehicle while under warranty, according to the Maritz New Vehicle Customer Survey.

Experience matters. Every action in a relationship either builds or erodes trust. We see this in the staggering number of divorces that occur every day—over 6,000 in America alone. The same can be said for consumers and their relationships to brands and products. How many times have we “broken up” with a brand because they didn’t deliver the experience the brand had promised, failed to communicate well or even did or said something that was a deal breaker—remember the backlash from Lululemon brand fans when founder Chip Wilson said that some women’s bodies weren’t “right” for their pants?

All of Marketing is caught up in ‪#CannesLions —but what’s the celebration really about? When we say that ‘All Marketing is Loyalty’—we mean it. Every step in the loyalty lifecycle that begins with acquisition and *must* continue in the form of an ongoing relationship, are equally important. Brands who do well by their loyal customers, offering them new and innovative experiences, are more profitably succeeding - if those experiences are good, they will tell others for you. We see this ideal in the submissions for this year’s Direct Lions and we are offered a close up look at what triggers bonding with a brand beyond the monetary.

Increased mobile presence is one of the most important shifts in the brand loyalty market right now, other than millennials, which we’ll talk about later! In fact, 65% of Americans want to engage with their loyalty programs through their mobile device (2014 Loyalty Report).

As people interact with brands more intimately, we are seeing a hunger for personalization—a step away from mass production and a movement towards agency and relevancy. This desire for engagement supports the 4-Drive Model of human motivation approach to brand loyalty, with regards to the drives to create and to bond—both of which in turn foster a deeper emotional connection between consumer and brand.