Know-How Exchange : Career/Training

Start by answering these questions:

1. Why might a person be interested in buying a vehicle? Is it a replacement? First purchase?

2. Other than price/terms, what are the most important features they want? What is the ultimate benefit? Is it mostly functional, or is there an emotional or aspirational component?

3. What are their alternatives? Who is your competition? How/why is your solution better than competitors' solutions? (If it isn't, you probably haven't identified the best target audience.)

From what you've described this isn't about awareness or establishing a product, but more about improving competitive positioning - how your USPs stack up against competitors in terms of the areas that the customer values. So the fastest way to understand what's happening is to do some research talking to customers and customers of competitors. Why are they making the decisions they are? What is it that they believe about your products, and what do they think the competition is doing better.

Without this we're guessing. But for commercial operators what they want to know is how the vehicle helps sustain their business better. So top speed isn't so likely to help, but factors like reliability, load capacity, security, easy of loading, fuel consumption, access to parts and repairs start to become important, and possibly (but less so that for consumers) some element of prestige and being a sign of success. Can you show that the Tata vehicles save money/make money for the commercial operation? It might be more expensive now, but how do you save in the long run (eg resale costs). You can make offers - eg service like warranty, guarantee, servicing, decals, without changing the basic product for instance. Once you know the focus - where you have an advantage you want to communicate, build an activity around that and add some razzle dazzle. If it's load capacity how many cricket balls can it hold, and bring in a local cricket star to test. Fuel economy show how far it runs on a 0.5L of fuel against a local athlete. It could be sponsorship, running an obstacle course/treasure hunt type event with liveried cars. Smart's done things like car-towers to emphasize the smallness. Use a prominent highrise crane, to life a handful of cars to the top of a tall building for a manoeuverability race in a small space. And there's simple stuff like leafleting, on the ground promoters, flyleafleting on older vehicles (eg with a trade-in offer). Once you have the focus of what you want to sell on, finding the method then gets easier.

Why not create a small fleet of 3 wheelers that are painted uniquely (shiny gold, for example) with a clear message on the side of them to prospective customers. The message would tie in with the color ("Make more money driving this!" or "Guaranteed Trouble-Free Ownership") with a phone number to call and/or website and/or text #? Let people see the vehicle in action all around the area, standing out. People who are looking to purchase would likely be looking at vehicles more than the average citizen.