Local market leader for 32 years.
Kristinn G. Bjarnason, Director of Sales and Marketing at Toyota Iceland, introduces his company with a number of striking statistics. Not only is Toyota one of the world’s best known automotive brands, but Toyota Iceland, the licensed importer of Toyota and Lexus vehicles, has been the local market leader for 32 consecutive years. In its most successful year it sold around 5,000 vehicles (on average, around 15,000 passenger vehicles are registered in Iceland every year). The company runs four dealerships and has 11 authorised repair shops.
“We are responsible for sales planning three to five years in advance. Twice a year we send that plan to Toyota Motor Europe and Toyota Motor Corporation. We are also responsible for keeping up the brand awareness of the Toyota and Lexus brands. Last but not least, we fulfil those aspects of corporate social responsibility set out by Toyota as an environmentally-minded mobility company.”
Kristinn’s team comprises two sales managers, one for Toyota and one for Lexus. The Lexus sales manager is also responsible for maximising value added services, known in the trade as “Vehicle Lifetime Value”. In addition, there are two product managers, a web-master, an in-house marketing expert and a PR manager. Finally, Toyota Iceland employs a social media manager. Working together, this “hybrid team” is responsible for both brand awareness and tactical campaigns. In Kristinn’s words, the team has a “360 marketing scope”.
“My first impression during the purchasing stage, when I saw the presentation, was that brandr index was a very simple and readily understandable analytical tool. I could immediately see how the brand score was calculated. There was not much I had to ask about —I immediately ‘got it’”
We don’t rest on our laurels
Why did Toyota Iceland source brandr Index? Kristinn explains: “Despite our predominant position, we don’t rest on our laurels. We purchase a lot of consumer surveys and conduct progressive surveys on our own—anything that can tell us whether our marketing efforts are yielding what we think they should yield… In general, whether we are still the market leader, whether we are socially responsible, whether we are an environmental company.” Kristinn says that the brandr Index approach is a bit different to that of the other surveys. “It not only gives us a comparison to our competition, but also an index on the points we are trying to get across in our general awareness efforts. In brandr Index these two info sets are separate, which is what has attracted me to the product. In the Spring of 2022 we ran our first brandr Index survey.”
“My first impression during the purchasing stage, when I saw the presentation, was that brandr index was a very simple and readily-understandable analytical tool. I could immediately see how the brand score was calculated. There was not much I had to ask about—I immediately ‘got it’.” Asked how useful brandr index was on a scale of 1 to 10 (where 10 is ‘exceedingly useful’), Kristinn gives it a nine.
“I will be repeating the survey”
Kristinn recalls that one of the questions was “How is your brand distinguishable from the rest of the market”. For Toyota the word that came up most prominently in the word cloud answer to this question was ‘service’. As Kristinn says, “This is the kind of information that you need, and the visual presentation of it was very good.”
On the likelihood of recommending brandr Index to other marketing practitioners on a scale of 1 to 10 (where 10 is “extremely likely to recommend”), Kristinn gives it a nine. “I will be repeating the survey”, concludes Kristinn, “I’m planning to do it annually.”
“For us, the management team, the usefulness of brandr Index was a validation tool. I don’t like having ‘single points of failure’ anywhere in the system and find it useful to be able to extract information from multiple surveys. But, there is also something else: brandr Index measures the four factors—differentiation, segmentation, perception and image, and social responsibility and sustainability—that every marketer should be looking at.”
