What you need to know:

• Tyre giant Continental bought Kmart Tyres & Auto from Wesfarmers for $350m in 2018 as a way to sell more tyres in Australia.
• Adele Coswello was CFO at the time. A year later she flipped finance to become customer chief – tasked with steering a total rebrand and transformation in a category that was already tough going, even with 50 years of brand equity. Then Covid came along.
• Coswello hired TBWA to handle brand, CX and media. Not the most obvious choice for end-to-end work, but she says the agency had the best ideas.
• Three years on, sales are building – and brand awareness is powering. Now mycar is positioning for electric vehicles with Chinese manufacturer BYD set to bring low cost units in numbers to Australia this year.
• It’s also trialling pop-up stores near major shopping centres, installing tech within outlets to give customers real-time streams to their phones on what’s happening with their cars, and pushing further into mobile servicing.
• TBWA, meanwhile, aims to take on the consulting firms as an end-to-end brand experience provider. CEO Paul Bradbury thinks the three-year process with mycar is proof that it has the chops beyond traditional creative.

Former Bunnings and Wesfarmers finance lead Adele Coswello laid down her bean counting credentials in 2020 to become Chief Customer Officer of the old Kmart Tyre & Auto, bought from Wesfarmers by German tyre manufacturer Continental for circa $350 million in 2018.

The new owners, needing to sell shedload of tyres to recoup that investment, wanted to create a new brand, ditching 50 years of equity in the process, focusing on people first, cars second. Just as they launched mycar, Covid struck. Not ideal timing but the new ‘people first’ brand platform, created with TBWA is paying off: sales are up 23 per cent since 2020. Now mycar is positioning for another major transition – electric vehicles – while bidding to steal share from free-spending pure-play rivals such as Bob Jane and Ultra Tune.

The push for fuller services mirrors TBWA’s own ambition to “play right across the brand experience,” per CEO Paul Bradbury. Delivering customer experience, creative and PR, the Omnicom-owned agency is also handling media for mycar. Three years into the brand transformation, it’s a case study and template Bradbury aims to replicate. He thinks creatively-centred agencies have an advantage over the big consulting firms also vying for meaty end-to-end brand and customer experience accounts. Just buying up agencies and touting seamless end-to-end capability is harder than it looks on paper, he suggests.

“It’s not easy building a creative culture across a big organisation with a big legacy in how the consultancies work,” per Bradbury. “That's a big challenge for them.”

Big switch

Coswello was CFO at the time of Continental’s takeover. Asked what possessed her to switch to customer chief, Coswello says the move just made sense. Hundreds of garages and some 1,300 staff are customers too – and somebody needed to drive the bus.

“We recognised that if we're going to be ‘people first’ in market, we need to live and breathe that internally in our business. So we had to have a seat at the table in the C suite,” says Coswello.

Plus, she wasn’t your average accountant.

“My roles historically in finance have always been far more commercial. I've always had a deep interest and curiosity on the future of businesses and how we could grow market share. And I've always had a passion for retail and customers,” she says.

“It just felt more around the CCO role. If we're going to be serious about a brand platform of ‘people first’, we need someone that's leading it.”

So she took on marketing, merchandise, customer care and business development – and openly admits there were gaps in her expertise while taking the opportunity to give TBWA a wrap: “That’s the purpose of partnering with a great brand agency.”

After meeting up with other brands that had recently rebranded – and under few illusions about the scale of the task ahead – Coswello engaged TBWA to remap the proposition and begin the brand overhaul.

“We’re in a tough, competitive category. Tyres are a grudge purchase.  It was already hard under KTAS. Under a new brand, it was going to be harder. So we needed a fresh set of eyes and that was the opportunity for us appoint TBWA as our brand partner for everything,” says Coswello. “It was a large remit.”

Major overhaul

“We had a bit of a job ahead of us,” admits Bradbury. “Big competitors, big spends and we didn’t have the media budget to compete with them in a grudge-like, low interest category.

So began the “brand immersion” process. “There were two big insights that led us to the brand platform,” says Bradbury. “The first is that mycar has an incredible team of mechanics across the country; technically brilliant, very good with people, always going above and beyond. In fact, the average tenure of a mechanic at mycar is eight years, which is pretty incredible for a service organisation. It says a lot about the culture that exists within the mechanics,” he adds.

“The second big insight was that this was a business built around servicing cars, not customers. Mycar were incentivised to act like a retailer, they were incentivised to upsell. The insight we saw is that they needed to act less like a retailer and more like a service provider,” says Bradbury.

“They needed to put the customer first. Which is how we arrived at the brand strategy, which is ‘care beyond the car’, and the brand platform, which is ‘people first’.”

Setting off

Over the next six months, brand and agency mapped the customer journey – from current state to future state – creating a priority list for the overhaul.

After rebranding and rebadging the outlets, ecom was the next big push.

“During the sale process, the business had essentially been on pause. So we had to concentrate our efforts on where we could differentiate ourselves from competitors and disrupt the category – and an early focus was our Google rating,” says Coswello.

“In January 2020 that rating stood at 3.8. Today we are at 4.8 and our views are up 21 per cent on last year.”

In September 2020, it launched Tyres Online followed by Servicing Online mid-2021. “That online journey is a complete end-to-end ecommerce experience and a complete differentiator to some of our other brick and mortar competitors,” says Coswello.

Meanwhile, TBWA went to work putting ‘people first’ out to market through advertising and media, flipping the traditional price-driven category approach.

“From an advertising point of view, it was very rich territory,” says Bradbury.

“You explore the relationship that people have with their cars and you portray yourself as an organisation that understands the customer and how important the car is to their lives. In a category that's all promotional and retail. We spent 60 per cent of our media spend on building the brand and 40 per cent on retail,” says Bradbury, with that ratio still applied today.

“That in itself was disruptive. Then it's applying that same lens to each stage of that customer journey: how can we make this process more people first? We were in the business of servicing cars, we’re now in the business of serving customers – this is a category ripe for disruption. That might sound ‘motherhood’, but for the category, these are seismic changes.”

Sleeper service

Next came new customer initiatives – with the ‘lullaby service’ a prime example.

“Those with young kids will know often the best thing to get them to sleep is to put them in the car and drive around the block. We've all been there,” says Bradbury. “But what if your car has got a rattle? The kid can't get to sleep. So we started a lullaby service where mycar will service your car, find where the rattle is and fix it completely free of charge,” he says. “The rattle at least”.

Coswello is also pushing transparency as part of the experience, trialling in-store tech to give customers a “digital readout” of things like like tyre condition, wheel alignment, battery and vehicle inspection that can be streamed to customers’ devices.

“There is a lot of uncertainty in this industry – I drop my car off and where does it go? What do they do with it? If we think about dealers, you don’t see the car at all, they take it away,” says Coswello. “I think customers want to know more, they want that transparency to understand what you have done and why you have done it. [And by using the in-store tech], it's not us manually having to go and show them.”

Bradbury thinks that kind of tech can become a central plank of the CX strategy. “If we can show in real time an image of what's happening, where your car is at in that process, that's making a much more people first experience.”

Human segments

Coswello says mycar “sees around a million customers a year” and ‘people first’ now also applies to its customer segments – now named, for example, ‘John’ and ‘Sarah’. 

“John is over 55. Today he’s just purchasing tyres from us. Although his car is seven years old, he still takes his car to a dealer [for a service]. But he could be bringing that car to mycar,” says Coswello.

Then there is Sarah, who wants to use a mycar sites close to a shopping centre and get the car serviced and some fresh rubber while she heads to the shops.

“So it’s how do we start that conversation … and having names [for the segments] helps our teams connect with customers walking through the door,” says Coswello.

But while the brand targets those segments within its advertising, it’s also going broad. “Anyone that drives a car, I want them to know about mycar,” she adds.

R-Plates

The brand’s most recent push – R Plates, raising awareness of people returning to the road after trauma via a car sticker like an L-plate or a P-plate – definitely boosted awareness. Bradbury claims the earned media via PR firm Eleven has notched 290 million views. “That means the average person in Australia has seen that story in the headline news eleven times,” he says.

“Within 48 hours we’d run out of plates. We’re producing a whole bunch more. We actually want it to become a practice lifted by state governments – and we are pretty confident that is going to happen,” says Bradbury. “We've had NRMA insurance endorse R Plates in their comms, completely unprompted, saying ‘we need this’. And we're confident that it could become a real thing, like a learner plate, like a P plate. That for us would be success.”

The campaign has helped push mycar brand awareness to “an all-time high,” says Coswello, suggesting it now sits at circa 50 per cent.

EVs: Power-play

Electric vehicles made up a little over three per cent in Australia last year. But demand is starting to steepen, with more manufacturers bringing EVs to market. Coswello is positioning mycar to be ready for the tipping point, whenever that comes.

“We have 30 EV-ready stores today, mainly concentrated around servicing BYD vehicles,” says Coswello, with the firm striking a deal in late 2021 to service the Chinese-owned vehicle brand. BYD is ramping up sales in Australia – and could be set to be second only to Tesla this year if growth rates continue in line with the last three months of 2022.

EV sales in Australia increased more than 600 per cent in 2022, but Coswello underlines that future-proofing the business does not mean getting ahead of the market.

“I don't think we should fool ourselves. There's always going to be the ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicle … You don't want to deter that customer from coming in if all they're seeing is chargers out the front of the store,” says Coswello.

“But the more that we can be the considered service provider for electric vehicles, [the more that] allows us to see those cars. And what we have learned is there is still quite a lot of servicing that needs to be performed on it. Not maybe in the early [life] of the vehicle, but certainly later.” Plus, EVs tend to be heavier, good news as far as mycar owner Continental is concerned, because they require more expensive, heavier duty tyres.

Despite splashing $350 million acquiring the network, mycar doesn’t just sell Continental tyres, with rival manufacturers also in the mix. There was an “education process” on that front, says Coswello.

“For us, it's around educating [Continental] that Australian consumers are brand-agnostic, so we have to have varying brands. Do we sell more Continental lines in our entry level and in our premium? Sure, but we also have other brands as well.”

Mobile, pop-up

Now Continental is keen to unlock further growth via geographic and service “gaps”.  Mobile servicing and pop-up stores are key planks of that plan.

“We did a lot of research that shows real appetite for mobile in Queensland. So we moved all the vans that had been sitting on the east coast [to Queensland] and we will continue to grow that and spread out across the east coast this year,” says Coswello. “It’s a convenience play – at your home, your workplace – and it allows us to look into other products as well. But products that don’t require one of our highly qualified technicians [that would otherwise cannibalise in-store workloads]. If it’s an accessory, great, maybe the mobile guy comes to your home and fits it.”

Mycar is trialling its first pop-up store in the Melbourne suburb of Chadstone – where the 550-store ‘Fashion Capital’ claims to be the largest shopping centre in Australia.

“That was one of the opportunities Continental saw when they acquired us. They know there is growth, we know there are market gaps,” says Coswello of the pop-up approach. “How can we be there for customers when they need us? Drop of your vehicle, we take it to another location, drop it back while you’ve been shopping. We’re just trying to challenge ourselves internally.”

Consulting counterpunch

The cover all bases approach mirrors Bradbury’s strategy for TBWA. He sees growth opportunities for ad agencies across brand and customer experience despite hot competition from consultancies flexing considerable CX muscle while adding creative firepower to squeeze out rivals and win end-to-end businesses.

“We want to play right across the total brand experience,” says Bradbury. “It’s a journey, we’re not totally there yet. But we’re learning and we’re growing.” While many agencies and consulting firms are positioning around end-to-end services, TBWA intends to use mycar as a case study to show it can actually deliver.

“We've been working with mycar for three years. It's only now that we're starting to talk about it because we didn't want to blow our horn before we actually had some tangible proof that our model and approach is working.”

As well as CX and brand, he says TBWA is delivering data and analytics for mycar and touts Omnicom’s Crederra, with a 60-strong Singapore hub as helping power that capability. Plus it has integrated media and creative, something few of the big consulting groups are doing – yet. Bradbury says that approach is delivering “cost efficiencies for the client, because there isn’t duplication and there aren’t competing agencies at the trough with different agendas”.

While best of breed doesn’t always arrive in a one-stop shop, Coswello says it’s working for mycar.

“I absolutely see the advantage. They sit together, they are accountable, it’s wringing one neck not multiple,” she says. “They all know where we’re going, they are aligned – which makes it so much easier for us.” 

Can TBWA, with its ad agency heritage, genuinely compete upstream with the Accenture Songs and the Deloitte Digitals? Bradbury reckons there’s a fair chunk to play for.

“I think we start from a different place, which is creativity. The consultancies have obviously recognised the importance of creativity to build differentiation across the experience. They're buying creative assets around the world and they're trying to integrate those assets,” says Bradbury.

“But we are grounded in creativity and as we’re building out [end-to-end] capability, we’re making sure we do not lose that creative potency. So we are being very deliberate and measured in the way we scale our capabilities because we do not want to lose that super power,” he adds.

The end point of the journey is to be “regarded as the most creative consultancy,” says Bradbury.

“We’re coming from creativity out. [The Accentures and Deloittes] are coming from consultancy and trying to instil a creative culture into the way they operate. That is a big challenge for them. We have an equally big challenge to build out our capabilities – and we probably won’t do it at the speed and scale of the consultancies," he admits.

“But certainly from our experience with mycar, there is some good muscle memory being built, some additional capabilities being built,” he adds. “We’ll just quietly build as clients want to allow us to be involved with their brand transformations.”