UX Design
My Role: UX & Service Designer, Copywriter
Identify a core business problem within a brand and design a digital solution.
Maserati
Lack of brand loyalty among younger generation customers (in Maserati’s fastest growing new market, China) is affecting potential return purchases and therefore sustainable business growth.
A service application designed to provide luxurious, personalized service to increase brand loyalty and result in future return purchases and sustainable business growth.
One problem we encountered at the beginning of this project was coming up with a core business problem for Maserati. Throughout our research, the company looked like it was expanding into new markets and doing well with sales, so from a business perspective, they were making money and there were no obvious gaps in this success for us, as a team, to find.
We decided then, it was time to visit the Maserati dealership in Vancouver to check out if we noticed or came across some new information. While chatting with a very friendly and informative sales associate, we learned that Vancouver has a very unique market for Maserati’s, they have very young buyers who are students from China who are able to buy these ultra luxury vehicles, and buy them for the prominent brand name but are not as loyal to the brand as Maserati’s “expected” customers. This intrigued us, but did not pose a specific core business problem yet, so we researched more into Maserati’s target audiences in their respective markets and discovered that their fastest growing new market was China, and that customers here were not buying Maserati’s for the same reason as in other countries. In short terms, they were buying more for status, than as a reward of success and therefore felt a lack of loyalty to the brand.
This research lead us to discover that this lack of loyalty was throughout the luxury market in China, and the biggest documented reason for switching brands was a lack of service. Thus we decided to focus on post-sales service for Maserati; by raising brand loyalty, we would also raise return purchases and therefore sustainable growth in their new marketplaces.
The idea of providing luxury service is that everything will be taken care of for the customer. Most steps involved in getting your car serviced requires effort on the behalf of the customer, calling in to make an appointment, taking time out of their day to bring their car in, waiting for their car to be ready, paying the invoice, and leaving the dealership. With the task of creating a luxury service, I needed to find a way to seamlessly remove these pain points from each business to customer touchpoint.
To approach this task, I began by making a customer journey framework to step by step go through the experience of having one’s car serviced. From experience working at a car dealership, I knew this process well, and was able to identify each stage from being alerted that your car needs service, to the payment and receiving your car back. Within each touchpoint there were multiple opportunities to remove or improve many existing customer friction areas thus resulting in a service design that felt luxurious and personalized.
Using this approach was the starting point to the whole service design that lead to:
