In contrast with under-appreciated car wellness, overall health awareness is growing in China. In 5 years, health supplement category has grown 18%, gym participation 13%, organic foods industry 30%.

Car owners needed to appreciate that, just as their own body does, a car goes through wear-and-tear too, and therefore requires care & maintenance.

So we created a unique ID, “MyCarPulse”, for each of the 20M cars, to interact with individual owners, building awareness that their car is dynamically unique, constantly being shaped by their own driving pattern, care and treatment.

“MyCarPulse” individualized cars with hyper-personalized messages that allowed owners to get timely lifestyle-relevant feedbacks from their car and also bring to live their on-the-road experiences.

We developed the hyper-personalized messages based on AI-powered 5-dimension owner profile including driving pattern, lifestyle and car condition, drawn from AI-powered state-of-the-art HADOOP framework of CRM, dealership, OnStar & WeChat community databases.

High-relevancy customized reports were the cornerstone of the campaign, complemented by interactive alerts and notifications tailored to the actual state of the car, with the purpose of establishing owners’ car health actively be on top of their mind. Through sophisticated, big-data powered connectivity analytics, hyper-personalized “MyCarPulse” reports were delivered at the least disruptive and most relevant times, eg. at end of lunchbreak to office ladies, pre-dinner to 9-to-6 white-collars. We also provided a platform to owners to share their experiences with service centers and maintenance experience to encourage lively discussion around the topic. An AI-based chat-bot solution was also implemented and it is currently in pilot phase, with great potential to make the system even more sophisticated.

In addition to a push-notification enabled interactive service calendar with cost-of-maintenance feature, we released daily tips on general car maintenance and on how to spot problems with the car. Offline events were held once a month across China, we organized activities in service centers, where healthcare/wellness professionals and car specialists analyzed the wellbeing of both car owner and the vehicle’s. As a result, personalized Wechats were then delivered.

Stellar results for a pilot – at +118%, more than double increase in service reservation rate (on wechat communities) at 1241% ROI*!

- Owner club registrations increased 30%

- Positive Word-of-Mouth on service center experience increased 50%

- Sharing of posts increased 76%

- Service centers attributed most incremental visits to MyCarPulse campaign

- Dealerships’ word-of-mouth was so strong that “MyCarPulse” will become an always-on service from second-half 2017 onwards.

Investment was only USD13,000 (additional coding of existing data network and post development).

It is transformative in 2 ways: the use of smarter AI interrogation and analytics of iMoment system, and an owned first approach with zero media investment even though we leveraged the mobile and social community media. The business ROI calculation is based on business revenue and coding plus post development costs. What’s more, it can be (and will be) scaled at zero incremental costs for potentially exponential revenue.

MyCarPulse takes a transformative approach towards data:

-While most auto-makers focused on standard car condition alerts & service appointment messages, we created SUPER IDs for each car to enable hyper-targeting. This was developed through KAFKA data-streaming technology on collaborative filtering algorithms (+172% accuracy through AI).

-Expanded from single-dimension car condition to 5 DIMENSIONS to develop rounded profile including demographic, geo & choronological lifestyles & driving patterns. Machine-learning-based AI function developed and continually enriches this profiling.

-Drew insights from 5-dimension profile to craft HYPER-RELEVANT COMMUNICATIONS to bring to live car wellness experience

We designed hyper-personalized WeChat/SMS communication for each “MyCarPulse” ID, which invited each owner to experience the uniqueness of their car beyond functionality.

First, we induced empathy with “MyCarPulse” daily emoji indices on wellness, diagnostics and driving profile. Delivery time of emoji was customized to owners’ driving pattern and lifestyle, eg. post-6pm pre-dinner time for office-workers; following morning for habitual late-workers.

Then we conveyed practical interactivity with “MyCarPulse” alerts for situations requiring immediate and in-depth advice – such as care advice after a long-distance drive; “rough terrain aftercare” for a city-only driver after rare bumpy terrain drive. AI-powered chatbot was created for further education and interactive solution.

Education was provided by chatbot Q&A & owners’ sharing in Wechat community.

Finally, to encourage maintenance, we sent customized service invitations that fit owners’ lifestyle, eg. bring forward service date after a long-distance bumpy drive; circumvent school holidays for owners who traveled during breaks.

China has the single highest traffic deaths (261,000) and 165,000+ auto breakdowns annually (32,000+ in US), causing >USD300M economic loss. With 200M personal cars on the road, and double-digit growth in ownership, this is becoming a major issue.

Many of these can be avoided with better car maintenance. Currently service frequency is 0.3 annually vs. 1.1 in US. Manufacturer’s maintenance quality ranks #6 as purchase consideration.

Barriers to good maintenance are cost, time, location and lack of “learning by osmosis”. While drivers in mature markets typically grew up learning driving and car maintenance in their youth at the side of their parents, in China many drivers are first generation in their family. The average first license age is 32 (20 in US).

10% of cars in China (20M) are SGM manufactured. SGM sees a social responsibility to inculcate maintenance best practices and opportunity to increase visits to authorized service centers.