20 Years of TLA. Celebrating our key-figures: Tom Nicolle

20 years of BMW - Tom Nicolle

Tell us a little bit about yourself to kick off and the work that you do at BMW. 

I’m the CRM Manager for BMW within the national marketing communications team. The CRM team look after the BMW customer journey across all channels and over the various stages in the life cycle, from acquisition and purchase of a new car, right the way through ownership to repurchase. As part of that, acquiring new customers, new prospects and new leads for the brand is key. 

Tell us about your relationship with TLA?  

Well, we’ve always worked with the lead agency since I’ve been in post. 

We’ve had a close, direct working relationship with TLA, and that’s been beneficial throughout. We really enjoy working with the teams and I think it’s good to have that direct relationship as well. So, while we do work through a media agency, there is a strong relationship directly. 

What are the type of things that you work on directly with the team at TLA? 

It’s really evolved over the years – when I first joined, we solely focused on lead generation but as the business has changed, we’ve become more focused on customers and looking at new ways to access different audiences.

As part of this evolution, TLA have been instrumental in helping us to focus on all areas of the traditional sales funnel, particularly during the peaks of the pandemic and other economic and market challenges where we had to pivot and adapt our approach. TLA’s focus on innovation has helped us achieve a healthier and more sustainable sales funnel during uncertain periods in a channel that has perhaps not traditionally been regarded as such by our business.

And then more recently, there’s been the digital lead qualification product that we’ve been using, which has been performing well, as well as numerous pilots.  

We are working on a number of pilots with TLA to enable us to explore how we can push our approach further forwards. TLA’s technology and expertise is proving invaluable in helping us on this journey. 

When we decided to work more closely with TLA one of the standout qualities has been their willingness to push the boundaries.  As a brand, we are focused on innovation, and the UK market is widely held as a leader in this regard. In a space that has arguably been viewed as traditional until recent years, TLA are changing perceptions within the BMW business through pushing boundaries and trying new things. TLA moves with our aspirations to continually innovate, test, use new technologies, and improve wherever we can. 

How do you see the market changing over the next couple of years?

In a broad sense, electric mobility is obviously a key one. And as an industry, it is a big change for an industry that’s been very settled for a long time, with little drastic change over the years. So, the change in fuel type and the change in customer behaviours around that is big. 

Now there’s a big job to convince prospective customers that electric motoring is the right way to go, and even hybrid electric motoring. I think that’s a big challenge, a big opportunity, but a big challenge, because there’s lots of barriers that come with electric mobility, a lot of myths that need to be dispelled, and the audience educated. It’s not just about building emotion anymore; it’s about educating as well. So, that’s a big challenge. 

Supply challenges caused by the semi-conductor shortage, as well as the lasting effects of the pandemic are clearly a challenge for us also that we need to overcome.  

I think some of the work we are doing to expand our focus to build and capture demand further up the funnel and further along in the customer journey is key to us being successful.  

In summary, pivoting our activity to be more customer-centric – not just push people to test drive cars or to go into their retailer – driving engagement with our digital assets, with our website, with our app. Also, online sales is part of that. That’s something that we have introduced, as other manufacturers have also, and perhaps it’s a big challenge for the automotive industry, but a big opportunity. 

What has been the effect of the past couple of years for BMW? 

Put simply, the last couple of years has taught us that offering customers a choice is extremely important. I think the customers are more in tune with experiencing things digitally and remotely now and in addition to this, the once-linear, traditional sales journey is no more. So, offering customers the choice of how to experience our products, how to learn about them and research them, on their terms is a challenge. We need to continue to meet these needs, as people’s media consumption and purchase habits change. Every customer is different.

TLA is here to help us with that challenge and we’re really looking forward to pushing things forward in the coming year and beyond and offering our customers new ways to engage with our brand and learn about us.

Tom works within the national marketing communications team, looking after the BMW customer journey across the various stages in the life cycle, from acquisition and purchase of a new car, right through to ownership and on to repurchase.