Ling Valentine interview, marketing differentiation
Interview with Bronwyn Durand of JupiterJasper for the Marketing Ideaology Blog August 2009
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The Basics
Please give full business name and contact details.
My business is called LINGsCARS.com Ltd
Ling Valentine MSc IoD
LINGsCARS.com Ltd
LING World Headquarters
Vance Business Park
Gateshead, NE11 9NE
Tel 0191 460 9444
Fax 0870 486 1130
sales@LINGsCARS.com
What is your name and role?
My name is Ling Valentine and I am the boss.
How long has your business been in existence?
Really since just after 2000, but trading as LINGsCARS since 2005. Previously my business was called PMH Contracts.
What is your industry and main product/ service?
LINGsCARS.com is in the new car leasing business, I supply new cars on contract hire. I run the only 100% online car leasing business in the UK. Competitors are conventional businesses, which happen have a website. LINGsCARS.com is a pure online business.
How many employees do you have?
In total I have 10 employees, a mixture of part and full time.
Where the business is going
What is your business vision? (What would you like your business to become?)
My business will become the leading car leasing company in the UK. I have already achieved the status of most popular online car leasing company, although there are companies with big telesales teams who are larger. In purely online terms, with 100% online customer handling, LINGsCARS is the largest in the UK. I feel that Internet based business will soon overtake telephone and more traditional sales methods in volume terms. No other UK car leasing company has a purely online business model. I have other ideas, for example I have opened a mobile phone site www.lingsmobiles.com that runs without any human intervention and am planning used car advertising site “LingTrader” and a cheap air travel site “LINGsWINGS”, finding all those £1 flights you know exist but can never find.
Sum up your brand.
To provide the very best personalised service to intelligent credit-worthy customers, giving them a great experience while acquiring a new car by the most transparent and cost-effective and simple method in the UK. My customer are ABC123 prime and credit-worthy people.
Customers
Describe your customers in a sentence. What do they want?
A new car; but on the most sensible, intelligent, cost-effective terms over a fixed period of time – for a fixed cost to minimise any risk.
Why should they choose you rather than anyone else?
Because, clearly, I am the best at providing the correct mix of cars, prices, service and entertainment. No business in the World publishes as many customer testimonials as I do. I even show all my customers on interactive Google maps www.lingscars.com/feature/customer_map.php.
Your Stand on marketing
Do you have a written down marketing plan?
I plan my marketing each year, but the nature of marketing is to quickly adapt to events; for example, I could not have planned TV appearances on BBC Dragon’s Den in my plan as there was no clue that it would happen, in advance. I plan an overall spend limit, and then adapt within it as the marketing develops throughout the year.
Do you have anyone in a full time marketing role?
I do all the marketing myself. Other staff contribute, for instance creating my website Flash header (different to any other) where I jump down from my masthead and interact with visitors.
What % of your profits do you spend on marketing (annually)?
Currently I spend a large proportion of my profits on marketing, as I class just about everything I do as marketing. It’s hard to give an exact percentage, as I am not sure what to class as marketing – in my view, it covers just about every activity I do.
What is your general opinion of marketing? (what would you say to businesses that don’t pay any mind to marketing?)
Marketing is simply my No 1 concern. As long as I have sourced the largest number of quality and best-priced product (as I type this I have 4171 individual car deals advertised on my website), and as I have a mature online customer management model, I concentrate on piling more customers into my “pot” through relentless marketing. You never know what will appeal to different people.
Very few other businesses in my sector do this. My competitors’ idea of marketing is to spend a fortune on paid adverts (adwords) on Google and advertising sites. I never pay for adverts there, preferring to develop my website so that Google ranks it in the top natural searches for every strong search term in my sector, and for millions of other long-tail searches based on content.
Further, I react instantly to web-forum interest, joining in and being pro-active, along with responding to blogs, newspapers and TV/Radio requests.
What is your marketing philosophy? (What governs your marketing choices?)
I view my main role (apart from the core leasing services) as entertainment. Much in the same way that Top Gear does not “road test” cars on TV, but entertains the viewers in many different and quite crazy ways. I lead on the Internet (in fact I am about the only person who does this), in my new-car field. I get a lot of criticism in the car trade for this unconventional and “unprofessional” approach. Their view of being professional is to be conventional.
Every other company seems to concentrate on cars; I concentrate on people. The new car buying cycle is very long, often 3 or 4 or 5 years. I need to engage, entertain and become memorable in people’s minds for a very long time. Other companies just look at who is buying today; so here are some cars. That is intensely narrow and boring. I look at the future and infect people’s minds with my name and character so that when they choose to replace their car in the future, they will consider LINGsCARS as one of their main choices. They will not even remember any other website names.
I look on every activity as marketing, even when there is no direct benefit. For example, I am proud to be listed by EdExcel as an A-Level exam question www.lingscars.com/feature/bized.php alongside McDonalds, EasyJet, Boots and Sainsbury’s, for students taking business qualifications. While none of them will directly take a car from me, who knows what their parents will do when they see their project? I assist them online by answering questions. You always have to give, give, give, you never really know where the results will come from.
If you could use no more than 15 words to (explain)market your business?
Emotionally engage with online new car buyers in a uniquely fun and entertaining manner.
What has been biggest marketing challenge for your business to date?
The biggest challenge was appearing on BBC Dragons’ Den, and manipulating the appearance to highlight my business (through use of logo images on TV of my nuclear missile truck), capturing the viewer’s emotions (through jokes, laughter and banter with the Dragons), securing investment offers (from Duncan Bannatyne and Richard Farleigh), then turning them down. That took a lot of planning to pull off. I practiced for weeks and it nearly killed me in effort. However, it was well worth it. Subsequently I was so successful I was featured in a BBC book and given a whole chapter “A lesson in sales and marketing”.
What was your first big marketing break, and what did you to capitalise on it?>
My first marketing break was using my Chinese, female personality in a world of stuffy, boring car dealers and car brokers. This drew immense negative reaction from the car trade who labelled me “a parasite”. To the UK motor trade “Ling” has become a term of abuse. I became known to the public searching for new cars to the extent that when you type my Christian name (“Ling”) in Google, I am the very first result. Very few people can claim that, in the World.
What is the most successful type of marketing you do and why? How do you determine what is successful?
Online interaction on forums and directly with visitors is my most successful marketing, because it directly engages with people who may become customers. Success is generating a large number of deliberate visits to LINGsCARS, and creating enough “wow” factor to register in people’s minds with an emotional reaction. I monitor my website on a live basis so can directly measure my marketing success, minute by minute. I can see where live visitors are coming from, you see.
Describe up to 5 of your most effective marketing stunts/ campaigns (what you did, period of time, what effect did it have)
Building my Nuclear Missile truck. This grabbed tons of attention and media.
Building a remarkable website. That was incredibly hard in the beginning, as I didn’t have many skills. It would be so easy to have a below-average list of car on a plain website (as 99% of car leasing companies do). Instead I used my energy to build the biggest and best website in the whole industry. There are no limits to websites.
Appearing on Dragons’ Den and controlling the Dragons with my “pitch and run” exercise. I never wanted any investment, just the publicity.
“Rescuing” Northern Rock when it was collapsing; I invested £10,000 when everyone else was withdrawing cash and gained some big TV appearances on the news and GMTV.
Creating my “Chop Gear” series of car road tests with my crazy sister Shan appearing as a Chinese Red Guard. These gained thousands of views and website visits when broadcast on You Tube.
(Ling’s TV ads and marketing antics can be viewed on http://www.lingscars.com/cheap-lease-cars.php)
Web presence
How much time do you spend maintaining your website? (in hours per month/ week)
Tons of time is spent building, improving and maintaining my website. It is massive. I have a database with over 10,000 car trims and over 250 tables. I have some pages, which if they were printed out would exceed 400 pages of A4 paper in length. I break all the conventional rules. My whole website is more advanced than any other in the UK car industry. I have one full time and 3 part-time programmers, geeky students from Sunderland University. There is no task that we cannot complete. Everything is done from my website, from marketing, sales and customer communication. There is a massive secure and Extended Validation back-end called LINGO that only customers ever see. All other car leasing businesses seem to have flat, one-dimensional websites which boil down to an outdated list of car deals. My website is 100% up to date and alive. I monitor it constantly; I seem to live inside LINGsCARS.
Assuming your website is your main sales tool, do you mind providing stats?
Number of unique visitors last month and last year:
Last year 2008, I had 612,821 unique visitors.
Last month June 2009 I had 79,700 unique visitors
I class every visitor as contributing 50p to my turnover, and I treat all visitors with equal importance. I monitor my website on a live basis. You can view live visitors on my website and see what they are doing in my “Camp LING” – a Maoist prison camp. This was recently spotted by Computer Shopper magazine when they said about it: “Welcome to the future.” They called me; “The leading evangelist of treating website customers with intelligence and collaboration”
Ave time visitors spent on site last month and last year:
Last year 2008 visitors spent 3:29 minutes on my site (average)
Last month June 2009 visitors spent 4:13 minutes on my site (average)
Number of enquiries last month and last year:
Last year 2008 I had 2616 finance proposals for cars
Last month June 2009, I had 387 finance proposals for cars
I have many more quote requests (typically over 900 per month, around 10,000 per year) and general enquiries.
Number of completed sales last month and last year:
This is hard to measure in definite time frames, as my “sales” often take far longer than one month to complete. Customers can be in process for around 5 months on a difficult to get car, for example. Other cars are processed and delivered within the same month. It is hard to allocate cars to an individual month or year, so I don’t fixate on counting numbers of cars.
In my accounts, in car retail price terms, in 2008 I moved £35 million of new cars, which is equivalent to a £350,000 commission income.
In 2009, I am on target for £40 million of new cars (at retail prices), which equates to £400,000 commission income, despite the current 25% fall in new car registrations due to the credit crunch.
Please see this file to get website stats
Motivate
Where do you get your marketing ideas? (do you have any regular sources of inspiration?)
I admire Michael O’Leary of Ryanair, and I constantly watch for opportunities in the media. My staff brainstorm on a regular basis and we usually go ahead with the most remarkable or crazy ideas. If it is difficult, we do it, because what makes things special is that no one else ever has the confidence to make the extra effort.
What would you tell a business (entrepreneur) looking for guidance on their marketing efforts?
I would say you have to have confidence in yourself and don’t be afraid to make a fool of yourself. Take every opportunity presented to you and give it 200% effort. Always broadcast any results you get as you never know what can be gained from the extra publicity. For instance, I have over 200 items of press and publicity published online as well as 1,300 customer testimonials and dozens of entertaining episodes of interest (for example the story of sponsoring two lads to drive to Mongolia in a Fiat Cinquecento, also how I sent 100’s of packs of FUKU noodles to the Burmese Ambassador in protest of the post-cyclone famine when foreign aid was prevented from entering Burma, and also how I made several funny and embarrassing movies about the racing rally drivers when I sponsored UK Rallycross Championships). There are literally dozens of other examples of marketing on LINGsCARS.com.
This interview with Bronwyn Durand and Ling Valentine was for Marketing Ideaology.
