An analytic platform combining data science and marketing intelligence processes for BMW

The automotive industry is dramatically changing inline with customers’ needs and expectations. Companies need to change while maintaining market share in an omnichannel world. It is not only a matter of coping with new business models, but also adapting internal organisation accordingly. For an automotive company, it is important to maintain a relationship with customers that goes beyond simply providing help and provides insights into their driving experiences.

These are the assumptions that drove BMW group to explore the potential of data analysis to accelerate the establishment of customer-centric and data-driven thinking and practices. Thanks to the support of TD Reply, BMW Group has created an interactive dashboard that incorporates insights serving diverse purposes: from measuring and understanding BMW’s digital brand and product perception, to observing and identifying relevant trending topics, and monitoring the brand’s channel, campaign and touchpoint performances.

The heart of the project is TD Reply’s Pulse Insights dashboard, an analytic platform that combines data science and marketing intelligence processes and is an automatic go-to single source of information including all business-relevant KPIs. BMW employees can review campaigns, social media channel performances, and product and brand perception for a multitude of markets and business units. Moreover, the project includes a comprehensive range of special analyses.

Since the rollout of the project, the carmaker has created a Data Analytics Centre for BMW and a Marketing Dashboard for MINI, both developed by TD Reply on the basis of the Pulse insights platform. The idea behind both projects is to enable data-driven decision making within the BMW Group by consolidating data silos, creating a global unified KPI set, gathering data before, during, and after any communication activity, as well as allowing for ad-hoc product steering. As a result, marketing efficiency increased, manual efforts for marketing performance were reduced, and the data skill set within the company evolved.

BMW is now equipped with valuable insights enabling continuous optimization of brand and product perception, as well as content creation and campaign performance which drive a significant return on investment. Thanks to this rollout the automotive group is today able to cope with more advanced analytical projects, such as business effect modelling and predictive analyses.