Opinion: CMO World Tour interview with Fiat's Joao Ciaco

Fiat’s Latin American marketing boss thinks the best way for brands to think of social media is to consider it like a party. The brands that want to be invited in and speak to the most beautiful lady in the party have to adhere to the rules.

“You can get into the party but you have to understand that there is music playing,” says João Ciaco. “If the brand understands the way the social media is being developed, then it’s okay for the brand to participate. If not, it’s absolutely excluded from the process.”

Ciaco – who is also president of the Association of Brazilian Advertisers – is fully signed up to the rules of social media. The owner of four different mobiles, he blogs, has dumped his laptop for an iPad – which he also uses to keep up with the latest movies when he’s travelling – and is an enthusiastic user of Twitter.

He’s such an accomplished user of the microblogging platform, in fact, that he claims to be able to play the piano while he tweets. But Twitter is more than just a party trick, it’s also his key social media platform.

“When I am just packing my suitcase, I am using my Twitter or going to a community to ask how is the weather over there? Is it cold? Is it hot? Is it raining so that I bring something different [to wear]? And even when I get into a city, [it’s great] to see my friends: I am going to have one night free in London, what are you doing?”

His biggest challenge at work, however, is grappling with the way that digital has changed the car buying process and the relationship between dealer, manufacturer and consumer.

Ciaco’s initial task at Fiat when he joined a decade ago was to set up an online sales site – later abandoned for all but volume sales. He argues that the key change that digital has wrought is that it enables consumers to learn about the car before they arrive on the forecourt.

Fiat uses TV to drive awareness, which in turn gets people online, which in turn gets them to the dealers.

“Ten years ago, TV used to talk about everything to do with the car; how it was configured? the engine, everything, all the features. It was almost an electronic folder about the car. If you see a commercial today, it just says: ride this car, just go to the internet and see everything that it has.”

Fiat is still experimenting with its point of sale strategy, testing new approaches with different dealers to ensure that the message is seamless across both online and point of sale.

“Instead of saying [point of sale] is the place to convince the customer to buy the product or to buy the car. It has to be the place to convince the customer to stay in the brand and continue in the brand and to have after-sale in the brand and to re-buy the product in the brand,” he says.

Frédéric Colas: How has the relationship between the brand and the consumer changed?

Joao Ciaco: We used to have a call centre, for example, for consumers to connect to the company when they had a problem or they had anything to talk to the company about. And the company decided whether or not to connect to this consumer.

The consumer today is not going to the brand anymore. They talk to other consumers, they talk to their friends and the brand has to go and participate in this conversation and decide what to do and what kind of initiative to take.

If the brand doesn’t participate in this communication, it’s absolutely out of what’s going on in the market and what’s going on with its products and everything that it’s working with. So the power is changing; instead of waiting for the connection, we have now to go. The decision to participate or not is the consumer’s decision, not the brand’s anymore.

FC: What has digital changed for brands?

JC: Speed is absolutely different, planning is absolutely different.

Plans used to [take] much more time, they used to have more details, [marketers] used to have more tools [and] time to use the tools. Today we have to take decisions immediately. We have to know what to do now and you have to take the risks, you really have to take the risks. Before you could share the risks, you could evaluate the risks. Now, we have to immediately take the risks of this decision or that decision.

FC: What’s are your key words for successful marketing in the digital age?

JC: I would say relevance and relationship for me are key. Relevance because we have so many, possibilities of contacting customers, thousands and thousands and millions of media possibilities and all the combinations have to be relevant to the consumer today. This is absolutely key and really difficult.

So that’s basically what I do all the time, [work out] how to be relevant to my consumer. And if my brand is relevant to the consumer today and I can create some kind of connection or any kind of relationship then I’ll succeed.

FC: How does digital fit into the automobile marketing process?

JC: Well, today is really important, 77 per cent of the Fiat consumers are connected. I mean they go first to internet before they go to point of sale. So if I don’t talk to them online, they are not going [to go] to the point of sale, they are not going to see the product. So digital is essential for us today.

FC: Where does social media fit into this process?

JC: We are using Facebook [and Orkut] today to create connections and develop relationships. For example, on the page that we have on Facebook we are presenting films of commercial spots that we are not presenting on TV, the mistakes that we made during the production, different things that make people talk about Fiat but with content, with something that is interesting for people and they just choose what they want to see or not.

… For me today and for Fiat’s approach today, Facebook is much more important as a relationship channel than a media channel.     

FC: Fiat recently launched an ECO car in Brazil last year and you’ve had amazing feedback from consumers across the world. What does that experience tell you about the way digital will affect the wider way Fiat operates?

JC: We have several committees in Association of Brazilian Advertisers discussing this right now; how to explain internally, how to use the internet internally to change the way of organizing business, organizing companies. And we in Fiat have a very interesting example; it’s a collaborative initiative that we have to create a concept car that we presented in Sao Paulo last year.

It was… initially planned as a small initiative, [but we got] 160 countries participating in the website in the discussion and in the blog. It was amazing, amazing the results that it had. [It was important] not just for the project, but also for the way it changes how the industry is organised. Instead of having the CEO’s decision for everything we are producing, we listen to the consumer and discuss with the consumer before we make the final decision. So it changes the hierarchy, the [way] decisions were taken.

…Our internal departments have connected, for example, in engineering, design, marketing [and are] working so closely. We never had this kind of approach before.      

FC: What challenges would like to get the advice from your peers at the WFA from?

JC: Well, several. First of all is that we can make a fantastic job on internet and then the consumer comes to the point of sale. If it’s not okay, everything that we have done is absolutely nothing. So we have to make this connection:  the dealer life with the brand’s life. It’s one thing that we still have to solve. It’s not solved yet and that’s important.

Another thing that I think we have to do is how to make – we always say that in cars you have to feel the smell of the new car. You know [the sense of] being in a car physically.

FC: The click of the door?

JC: Yeah, the click of the door, the noise that you don’t have inside of the car when you drive. And I think it’s important to create this perception of the product. We can’t do this with online, so how do we bring this important aspect to the internet or digital experience is something that we still have to solve: How to mix the real with the online experience.