Community management of Toyota Owner Club

Background

Technology takes part in the development of human being, especially information and technology. It creates globalization in almost every sector of economy, politics, education, and culture in almost every country. Technology makes information almost borderless and simplifies the customer source of information but on the other hand makes the market analysis grow more sophisticated and also creates the need of improvement in knowledge to understand the marketing model to cope with the dynamic improvement of technology.

Marketing as knowledge to describe “what-who-when-where-why-and how” to the market works describe in 3 main issue which is ;

1. Product management
2. Customer management
3. Brand management

That is all learnt by marketeers so corporates could generate the demand of production continually time after time and surviving in the market. The problem nowadays is when the company’s marketing slowly has less effect on customer due to a lack of trust or the obsolete company methods used in today’s shifting market, companies needs to be more ease and open to new, necessary information so it could be disseminated to their customers.

Social media and information portal, easily accessed by those who need current information and recommendations, is more preferrable to the consumer. A research said that 90% of customers are sure about recommendations his/her friend gave them and 70% of customers are sure about opinions on the internet. Somehow it is a phenomenon that less of consumers are convinced of company’s advertisements and shifted to another form of “advertisement” which is what we call recommendation by acquintances.

It is an opportunity for companies to take advantage of a community or group of loyal customers as an information pipeline to attract customers and prospected customers. It is what we know as word of mouth, which the dissemination of information is not massive but specified and spread in high speed thus making it unstoppable. To companies, above the line (ATL) advertising should not only be the main focus and main budget spent to market their product information and create the willingness to buy, companies also should convince the potential customer by developing the methods of effective below the line (BTL) advertising effective-efficient.

Community involvement in this BTL aactivity is one of the activations in horizontal marketing. How to do that is develop a company that has marketing orientation from a precious concept (main issue of marketing explained above) into new concept of horizontal marketing which contains;

1. Co Creation
2. Communitization
3. Character building

The point in communitization is explaining the relationship between the company and the consumers with a community between them. Godin Seth in his book “Tribal” concludes that successful companies have the support from the community.

It explains that consumers intend to be more connected with other costumers rather than with the company. Here is great oopportunity if companies understand what its consumers want and take the appropriate action by accomodating consumers in a community or enter the existing community and give the company’s influence there. A company needs to help consumers connect to their community so the influence has more power to persuade the following marketing effort. Fourier and Lee explain that consumers themselves would choose where they belong on the following type of connection :

1. Pools : here is where consumers are real brand fans and event hough they did not interact directly with other consumers in a community they would still be “brand evangelists” and strengthen brand power.
2. Webs : the consumer has one-on-one interraction, it is typically consumers who connect with each other on social media. They spread information and influence in one-on-one interaction but usually also affects other group members.
3. Hubs : A hub connection needs a leader, the trend setter and figure who brings another consumer (follower) into the network and these consumers will move around the leader and create a loyalty of brand.

We might agree that a community is developed not to serve the business but to serve their members which attracts loyal consumers. But this indirect relationship does not mean the company has no intention, the company needs to maintain in effective-efficient way so marketing effort will not be a waste but instead succeed slowly but sure, the company builds the building blocks of a consumer’s trust and loyalty, and the community has significant role in it.

Problem formulation

For the background has been explained before, authors have researched the question to be developed as mentioned below:

1. What are Toyota Owner Club’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in its current position ?
2. How Toyota explains the frame work and milestones in this community management process ?

Research objectives

This research is done pursuing the explanation of problem found and set objectives as shown below :

1. Identifying Toyota Owner Club has strength, weaknesses, oopportunity, and threat
2. Giving suggestion of current community management process has frame work and milestone

Research scope

Author has scope in this research are:

1. Research conducted while doing industrial training in PT Toyota-Astra Motors (Head Office, Jalan Yos Sudarso – Sunter II Jakarta 14330) in Marketing Division- Marketing Communication Departement, Event Section.
2. Information provided is infromation from author has observation, discussion, and primary and secondary data from industrial training period.
3. This research is not for profit and conducted as author has suggestion to the management, event section of PT Toyota-Astra Motors.