One campaign, forty variants: the arithmetic of a dealer group's year

A marketing director at a Gulf dealer group is rarely short of ideas. What they are short of is the capacity to execute the idea they already have across everything it has to appear on, which is a different problem and responds to a different remedy.

The structure of automotive retail here makes this unavoidable. Al-Futtaim Automotive alone represents more than twenty-five brands across eleven markets. A group of that shape is not running one marketing operation; it is running a portfolio of them, each with its own principal, its own model cycle, and its own approval chain. Even a single-marque distributor faces the same arithmetic in miniature.

The multiplication, worked openly

Take one marque with eight models in the current range. That is the number the marketing plan is written against, and it is the last honest number in the process. Consider what happens to it.

• -Variants. Most models carry three or four trim levels, and several carry powertrain variants alongside them. Eight models become perhaps twenty-eight saleable configurations, each of which has a different price, a different specification sheet and a different buyer.
• -Channels. Each configuration that is promoted at all needs treatment for paid social, display, the group's own website, the portal listings, email, and the showroom itself. Six surfaces, each with its own dimensions and character limits.
• -Languages. English and Arabic at minimum, and the two are not translations of one another when the copy is doing any commercial work.
• -Offer cycles. Ramadan, summer, the back-to-school window, year-end plate clearance, and whatever the principal announces at short notice. Call it six meaningful cycles in a year.
• -Locations. Showroom-level variation where inventory, availability and local offers differ between Dubai, Abu Dhabi and the Northern Emirates.

The point of setting it out this way is not to arrive at a single frightening number, because the number depends on choices every group makes differently. It is to notice that the marketing plan describes the first line of that list and the marketing budget is consumed almost entirely by the remaining four.

Why the cost is invisible

In most groups this work is not carried as a line item called multiplication. It is distributed across an agency retainer, a production budget, a translation invoice and the overtime of a small internal team, and because it is distributed it is never examined as a whole.

The retainer is where most of it sits, and a retainer is two purchases on one invoice. One of them is judgement: the campaign idea, the media strategy, the decision about how a marque should speak in this market. The other is production: resizing, adapting, localising, versioning and trafficking. The first has not become cheaper in the last three years. The second has become dramatically cheaper to deliver, and the invoice has generally not moved to reflect it.

The monthly report, which is the same problem wearing a suit

There is a second version of this pattern that costs less money and more seniority. Every distributor reports upward to its principal on a fixed cycle, and every one of those reports is assembled by hand from the same sources each month: registration data, stock position, marketing spend against plan, lead volume by source, conversion by showroom, and a commentary explaining the variances.

The commentary is judgement and belongs to a person. The assembly is not, and it typically occupies several days of the most expensive commercial time in the business, every month, in order to produce a document whose structure has not changed in years. A group that rebuilds nothing else should still look hard at this one, because the cost is concentrated in a small number of senior people and the output is entirely predictable in shape.

The counter-argument, fairly put

Brand guardianship is the real objection, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved away. A principal audits how its marque is presented, and a group that produces variants at speed without control will eventually produce something that breaches the guidelines, misstates a specification, or quotes a price that is no longer live. In a regulated advertising environment the second and third of those are not merely embarrassing.

The answer is that variant production and variant approval are separate questions, and that most groups have historically controlled the second by rationing the first. Producing fewer variants is a crude form of quality control. It works, in the sense that a group which makes forty assets makes fewer errors than one that makes four hundred, but the cost of it is the entire long tail of configurations that never get marketed at all because there was no capacity to reach them. A group that rebuilds this properly increases volume and tightens approval at the same time, and if it cannot do both it should not do either.

What I would do

• 01Count the year honestly. Take last year's actual output and total the discrete assets produced across marque, model, variant, channel, language, cycle and location. The number is usually several times what the marketing director would estimate from memory.
• 02Split the retainer. Establish separately what the agency is charging for judgement and what it is charging for production, and price the production half against what it now costs to produce internally. That comparison is the entire commercial argument, and it should be made with figures rather than assertions.
• 03Rebuild the monthly principal report before touching the campaign work. It is smaller, it is entirely internal, it involves no brand risk, and it frees the senior time needed to do the larger piece properly.