Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
Wed, 4 Dec 2024
Mazda is redefining customer experience by putting humans at the center of everything it does. On this episode, Brad Audet, CMO of Mazda Americas, shares insights on how emotional connections and personalized experiences can drive brand loyalty and business success. Plus, he explores the importance of human connection in business and how it can transform customer experiences.Tune in to hear about:Customer Experience as a Competitive DifferentiatorOmotenashi: The Concept of Radical HospitalityThe Importance of Emotional ConnectionBringing Human Connection into BusinessThe Role of Technology in Enhancing Human ExperienceThe Balance Between Technology and Human TouchListening vs. Hearing in Customer InteractionsThe Importance of Tonality in CommunicationThe Role of CMOs in Sustainable Development Goals–How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org
Chapter 1: What is Mazda's approach to customer experience?
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Brad Audet, the CMO of Mazda Americas. Today, we are going to dive into how he leads the brand's evolution through personalized customer experiences, strategic partnerships, and innovative marketing campaigns that drive emotional connections between Mazda and its customers.
Brad, so wonderful to have you.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to this discussion.
So how is customer experience a competitive differentiator for you?
Well, I think in the automotive industry in particular, you're seeing a convergence of commonality across the number of the different manufacturers. I mean, everybody is building great cars, high quality cars, cars that are well-crafted, cars that have great powertrains and great safety. I think having distinctive customers
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Chapter 2: How does Omotenashi influence Mazda's service?
born out of what's important to your customers, but also who you are as a brand and a business. So at Mazda here in the US, we put a lot of emphasis around how we create more customer delight. And we focus on a thing called Omotanashi, which is a Japanese term that speaks to, in some ways, kind of like radical hospitality, if you will, in the most simple sense, right?
We very much believe that one size fits one. You may have heard that in the past from a guy named Will Godera, who wrote a book about hospitality and the restaurant that he ran. But we think that it's very important that we anticipate and work selflessly for those we serve. If you look at our purpose, our purpose is enriching the lives in motion of those we serve.
So we very much look at our engagement with our customers and all of our stakeholders for that matter in terms of how we serve them.
And I've heard you say that human connection is essential today. Can you elaborate on that a little bit and how you're incorporating the concept of human connection into the work you're doing at Mazda?
Well, I think we're at a period of time right now in our society where people need to be connected to each other emotionally, intellectually. there's a lot of narrative out there, a lot of rhetoric, a lot of conversation that divides us. And the reality is, is there's a lot of things that actually bind us together more so than divide us.
And I think you need to celebrate the greatness of humans and human potential. And that's what we're trying to do at Moz. And I think coming out of the pandemic, people are yearning for psychological safety, for environmental safety, for, for financial safety. And that idea of safety can best be addressed through the caring of another individual to the person in need.
And so we feel that, you know, celebrating humanity right now at a time when we're at a bit of an inflection point is very important.
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Chapter 3: Why is human connection vital in today's business?
Mm-hmm. And how do we bring that into business? Because I agree with everything that you're saying. And then when we talk about how do we tie that to the businesses that we are running and really incorporate it into it, tell me a little bit about how you're doing that at Mazda and just in the work you're doing as a CMO.
Well, so one of our key values as a company is radically human. And that really speaks to putting people at the center of everything we do. And that philosophy was born out of the rebuilding of Hiroshima. And I think this idea is about curating an experience that heightens people and uplifts people. And so that's a very important piece of everything that we do for Mazda.
We talk about the cars that we build have a sense of jimbaitai, which is the closeness between man and machine or horse and rider.
and i think that's that's a really unique attribute that makes mazda different it's part of our dna it's part of our heritage now to get to your specific question our philosophy is very much around humanized growth so if you put you know by putting people at the center of everything you do the solutions that you design need to work for the betterment of everybody and reducing some type of friction or pushing people forward in their lives
And in fact, if you look at the new brand platform that we recently launched, Move and Be Moved, it's very much about taking people to better places, right? About pushing them forward in their lives, helping them to enable to make the progress that they need to have in their lives to have a life well lived.
And I think that's where Mazda can be a really great companion because we authentically believe that by making your day a little bit brighter and put a smile on your face, that you then can make somebody else's day a little bit brighter. And collectively, we live in a more peaceful society overall.
I think it's such an important thing for businesses to think about. We are humans serving other humans. And at the end of the day, if we can connect to that innate human need, that is where we create authentically providing value. And we all as consumers want to receive actual value and not just be sold something.
And I think that Mazda does such an amazing job of really hitting on that human note. And as you're saying this, I'm like thinking about the ads that I've seen from Mazda that always just feel so uplifting. Can you tell me a little bit about your process of really approaching marketing from that human driven lens?
Yeah, well, I think the best marketing is all anchored in a customer insight. I think for a period of time over the maybe the last decade, As a marketing community, we became very focused and reliant on performance marketing, right? And driving conversion with people. We all lost the essence of storytelling and celebrating the true greatness of humans.
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Chapter 4: How does Mazda balance technology and human touch?
And I think this pendulum is starting to swing to the other side now and maybe finding more balance that you can't have great performance marketing without a great brand story. And I think with what we've done recently, we just went back to who we are as a company.
and our truths and celebrated those truths because we know that there's a yearning in society right now amongst a core group of customers that share common values with us. So, you know, in the new work and in the new platform, we're just, we're celebrating those shared values that we have as a community.
And so it's bringing that into thinking about the customer. How do we deliver on those values of the customer, those current needs that they have in this day and age and, and really be there with them in that, in the marketing that you're providing and the initiatives that you're putting out there.
I think, You know, if you're a brand whose core value is, you know, one of their core values is being radically human, that means that you need to be a very intentional listener and a very active listener. I think there's a difference between hearing and listening, right? So, you know, we all hear things, but listening is about process, right?
Yeah.
And so how we process that and then how we create responses to what we're hearing, people talk about us. I can't even imagine how we ran marketing departments in the absence of social listening 20 years ago. We relied on a lot of really intense research and studies. And now every day I can pull up a dashboard. I can go into...
various uh various community groups and see exactly what people are thinking about mazda what are they thinking about society what are they thinking about the environments what are their pain points and then be responsive to them in a in a real-time way so i think you know the one other kind of business philosophy or approach that we've taken
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Chapter 5: What defines effective listening in customer interactions?
That was really born in the pandemic that is serving us very well post pandemic is creating a more agile business construct and being responsive to the significant disruption that's happening in the marketplace right now. It's likely to continue through the end of the decade, right? So this idea of, you know, of a more.
You know, just being able to react to the stimulus that we see in the market and adjust our business plans accordingly has served us very well. And I think that's been a primary driver of our growth over the course of the last several years. I mean, this year is going to shape up to be our best retail sales year in the 52 years we've been in business. 54 years we've been in business in the U.S.
So I think, you know, there were a lot of positive lessons learned for us as a business going through the pandemic. But I could say the focus on people, people serving people, has been one of the key principles of that.
Wow. That's really impressive. Congratulations.
Thank you. Thank you. It's definitely a team effort. That's for sure. Right.
Mm hmm. Yeah. I want to double click on something that you said about the difference between hearing and listening. Because I think that there is such an important distinction in that. And I often work with teams, enterprise, customer success teams that are really working one-on-one. And
It is different to listen in a one-to-one conversation than it is to listen to the masses in the way that you're mentioning and that social listening and to really understand what is happening for our customers and those people. Can you tell me a little bit about that listening versus just the hearing?
Yeah, well, I think a couple of things, right? People have this way of wanting to define listening through their ears only. You have to listen visually and you also have to listen to behaviors. And you have to triangulate all of those things.
And I think what we try to do is try to find common themes or clusters of unique behaviors, attitudes, reactions to people, and then figure out, okay, which of those do we need to try to resolve or react to and which of those don't we need to resolve or react to?
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Chapter 6: How is Mazda addressing sustainability in marketing?
And I know that might sound simple to say, but when you think about how you appreciate people, it becomes very simple.
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It's interesting, you know, as we enter this new age of AI and we're focused more and more on how computers are or AI agents are able to do things for us. I think it's such an important narrative to really bring back this importance of technology.
humans and the fact that we are humans using technology, that we're humans doing business and to not get lost in the like, yes, it's amazing what AI can do for us, but for us, for us, the humans. And I just see, you know, the narrative is so new and this technology is so new and how we utilize it is still yet to be seen exactly. How does the dust settle with the connection between humans and AI?
But I just I think it's so important for us to keep having this conversation about technology. humans being here because just as you said like I mean from a we are divided and we have a environment that we are also dividing ourselves from and coming back to the real you know why are we here in the first place is it's always been important and it's more important now than ever I think
you know i don't believe that ai can replace a human touch right there are nuances like we just talked about with active listening the importance of understanding moods and stuff and i'm sure some um you know data scientists or technologists will tell me that that capability is here right now and can be done but you know human to human connection i don't think can be replaced by by technology in fact the way that we
At Mazda, think about it is very much, you know, technology is like the helping hand, right? It's not a replacement for humans. And I think we look at how do we use technology to help enhance human capability? Because we want humans to be at the center of everything, right? We want them to have control. And technology can help in assisting that control, but it can't replace control, right?
I would say, you know, we're a car company that would most likely always have a steering wheel in our car. Right. Because I think our customer like the responsiveness and the control and the exhilaration that comes from driving. Right. And they have a lot of love for driving and you can't. necessarily get that through a very technology driven kind of experience.
I think the other thing I've been thinking about just in this space, you know, since we're kind of on AI is we talked earlier in the discussion about the importance of psychological safety. emotional safety. Well, what is truth? And where does truth fit in that spectrum of safety?
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Chapter 7: What role does technology play in enhancing customer experience?
And how do you know that the information that's being curated for you in these new environments is actually the most true to you or for you? And I think that there's going to be some skepticism there. And I think what's unknown right now is how brands play in that space and how you can offer the brand's authentic truth in this environment that's being aggregated and that
you don't have a lot of control over.
How are you using AI in your customer experience?
Well, we use it across the board on a number of different ways, whether it's looking at sentiment and how customers are behaving, how we're aggregating.
data we've got a couple products that we use with our teams like where we have kind of an audience brain and a brand brain that allows us to kind of use like a chat gtp like environment to do queries on different aspects of the brain run hypothesis against audiences and brands things of that nature clearly all of our all of our connections planning that we do through media and and uh
Creative development and optimization is all AI driven. So it's pretty pervasive all the way around. I don't think that we are at a point right now where we're saying, hey, let's develop our own AI agent to help facilitate the shopping experience because we believe in the human to human connection and dealers are super important to us in our value equation.
So, you know, I think in the future state, we're going to have to figure out where and how we adopt these technologies to best serve the customer. But right now, you know, we've gone through over the last five years a really dramatic physical plant improvement with all of our dealers. encourage a very high level of customer engagement, delight in the experience that they have.
So, you know, with our retail partners, we've invested a lot in that and we want to continue to get the value out of those experiences and don't want to replace that with, you know, artificial intelligence.
I can imagine with your dealer relationships, you have less control over the customer experience. So how are you really keeping those human-centric values alive in the dealer to customer relationship?
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Chapter 8: How does Mazda maintain its identity amidst AI advancements?
Well, I think first and foremost, we have an extraordinary partnership with our dealerships and we have a lot of shared values and they come along in the journey with us, right? We're co-partners in the success of our business and And I think we probably are very unique in that regard in a lot of ways in the U.S. automotive market phase. Our dealer satisfaction.
and their optimism towards Mazda is the highest it's ever been in the 54 years we've been in the U.S., and we're right in the top of the list across all of the various manufacturers. So I think the thing with our dealers is to understand that they're independent businessmen and women, and they have a business to run, and they have a formula and a philosophy and way of doing it.
And I think what we've tried to do is talk about values and behaviors and beliefs and allow them to bring those to life in their unique culture with their employees so that there's a consistency of application and a desire of what the ideal state is from a customer experience standpoint, but we're not going to be prescriptive in it.
And I think the idea is if you're going to be radically human, you have to have enough breathing room within the construct for the human to be their best. And that means you can't be super prescriptive. Right. So I think, you know, if we look at our situation, our dealer relationships are are significant and important to to our success. And, you know, we do do a lot of things.
We communicate very regularly with our dealers at all levels and we keep them well informed and we ask them their points of view. We don't always agree on everything. Mm hmm. We don't always adopt everything we say, but we listen to them and we act on it when we can. And I think that's benefited our business pretty dramatically.
What kind of training do you provide or how do you really ensure that that relationship is consistently strong and that the dealers are supporting your customers in the way that you envision?
Well, I mean, we have a number of different evaluations and scorecards where we look at business health across a number of dimensions. And specifically to customer experience, that's one of the areas my team oversees. And we do a number of different surveys and diagnostics to understand how is the dealer behavior changing? resonating with customers, are they satisfied with it?
And then we have a number of different trainings and educators that go in and help the dealers to understand where their areas of deficiency are, right? And it's an ongoing thing because you can imagine in any business, you have turnover and you have to teach people new things. I think that's an area where technology and virtual learning and self-learning can be an important piece of equation.
But we've been doing some work over the course of the last six or nine months with a small group of
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