As a result of our focused regional marketing and communication push, and our extracting learning from social listening and putting it all to use, CAT’s business grew. In fact, CAT enjoyed double-digit growth when the industry had double-digit decline.

(Chart 13)

We also achieved a large and positive change in brand perception (Chart 10, 11):

From the priority leads data, we saw huge growth in the important regions such as Chongqing and Henan (Chart 12). These were the key target regions for the marketing communication initiative, and show great potential for further growth in sales.

As we look back, we see our growth in leads, sales and strengthening brand perception as great results, indeed. We see key to this growth and success is how our social listening helped to communicate in ways that were relevant and meaningful to our goals of growth and changes in brand perception.

Data helped our creative output in two important ways

1. Focus on certain regions (chart 3) and project types (Chart 6) and communication channels (chart 7) to engage our customers most effectively

2. Social listening helped us in developing a certain language and execution that could connect with people in this region.

a. Local language/dialect: In order to connect better we used local dialect in our video content (Chart 4.1, 4.2)

b. Local topics that were on our targets’ minds. Whether it was making enough money to be able to get married, or the custom of turning to fortune-tellers to decide whether to buy an excavator, subjects coming out of social listening informed the creative directly.

c. Leveraging different kinds of experts: We learnt that customers relied on word of mouth from experienced users of excavators (Chart 5). We leveraged this insight by using experts in our communication to persuade people about CAT. These experts were of three kinds – business experts, financial expert and machine experts.

By integrating data from different sources and doing a comparative analysis we were able to break free from industry conventions:

Business Decision:

Convention: Grow in all industries

CAT’s Insight Driven Decision: Focused Growth with Mining, Construction, and Manufacturing industries

Marketing Decision:

Convention: National push

CAT’s Insight Driven Decision: Regional push

Communication Decision:

Convention: Brand promotion in standard mandarin language

CAT’s Insight Driven Decision: Brand promotion in local dialect, through use of local symbols and three types of experts

Journey of Data:

From: Industry Data To Select Region (Chart 3);

to: Brand Data To Understand Purchase Barriers (Chart 7);

to: Social Listening Data To Capture Local Nuances For Creative Idea (Chart 4.1-4.2);

to: Media and Big Data To Select Effective Channels (Chart 8)