Ling Valentine runs LINGsCARS.com Ltd. This is a car leasing company that has taken marketing differentiation to a new level in an industry where professionalism is rooted in convention.

In an interview with Bronwyn Durand, Ling has given some great insight into how clear brand direction and giving your customers what they most want in a fresh way can be the path to your success.

Ling is a shining example of how breaking the rules may just be better.

www.LINGsCARS.com is on track to achieve 40million in leased car sales in 2009, despite the 25% drop in new car registrations in the UK. LINGsCARS is an online car leasing company, providing new cars by contract hire to private and business customers across the UK.

The website had 612,812 unique visitors to the site last year, and based on last month’s figures, is likely to achieve at least a million unique visitors this year.

Why?

Ling says, ‘Because, clearly, I am the best at providing the correct mix of cars, prices, service and entertainment’.

To fully appreciate the interview, view LINGsCARS here. A written explanation wouldn’t do it justice.

So what is the Ling perspective?

Customers

The goal: To provide the very best personalised service to intelligent creditworthy customers; giving them a great experience while acquiring a new car; by the most transparent, cost-effective and simple method in the UK. Ling’s customers are ABC123 prime and creditworthy people.

Ling’s approach to customers:

• The focus is on people, not cars.
• Every customer will be dealt with in a thoughtful and a correct manner.
• Ling’s website demonstrates the customer response time (and its good).
• In a competitive space filled with faceless dealer groups, houses and brokerages, Ling stands out for quality personalised service and efficiency.
• Every website visitor is treated with equal importance, and their website journey is monitored on a live basis through another Ling ‘first’. Computer Shopper magazine spotted this and said about it: “Welcome to the future.” They called Ling “The leading evangelist of treating website customers with intelligence and collaboration”

The key effect of Ling’s differentiation is memorability. The interactive entertainment and sheer Chinese madness of the website create a powerful experience intended to optimise the chance to be first-to-mind over long buying cycles – Ling isn’t just concerned with the first sale, but the ones to come.

Website

The only car leasing company to have an entirely online business model, everything is done from the website: sales, marketing and customer communications.

Ling says: ‘My website is 100% up to date and alive. I monitor it constantly; I seem to live inside LINGsCARS. 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.’

This ‘live’ availability of great deals is very advantageous in an industry where speed of securing a deal is of paramount importance, and where competitors are displaying an outdated list of car deals.

Ling: ‘I used my energy to build the biggest and best website in the whole industry. There are no limits to websites’.

Marketing

Ling: ‘I consider everything I do to be marketing – its my number 1 concern’.

Marketing is planned each year, but in such a way to facilitate adaptation as marketing opportunities present themselves – like Dragon’s Den. A spend limit is defined and allocated to what will best take the business forward – often brainstorms producing the most remarkable or crazy ideas will get the budget.

Given that there is a mature customer management model in place, once Ling has sourced the best deals, everything is geared towards relentless marketing. Ling says: ‘You never know what will appeal to different people’.

While competitors are spending a fortune on paid adverts, including adwords, Ling has focused on developing natural search to be top for every strong search term in the sector, as well as a long tail of content-related searches.

Marketing is driven by the entertainment factor – Ling explains the approach: ‘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’.

Ling’s memorable marketing includes (there are many many examples on her website)

• “Rescuing” Northern Rock when it was collapsing: Ling invested £10,000 when everyone else was withdrawing cash and gained some big TV appearances on the news and GMTV.
• “Pitch and run” on Dragon’s Den: entirely intended to promote the business. Ling managed to be entertaining and secure offers from two Dragons before turning them down. Ling says: ‘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”.’
• LINGsCARS is listed on EdExcel as an A-Level exam question alongside McDonalds, EasyJet, Boots and Sainsbury’s, for students taking business qualifications – demonstrating the belief that every activity is marketing, even when there is not necessarily an initial direct benefit.
• “Chop Gear” series of car road tests with Ling’s crazy sister Shan appearing as a Chinese Red Guard.
• Ling’s marketing assets include a Nuclear missile truck, a London bus, and Beijing jeep

Inspiration

Ling admires Michael O’Leary of Ryanair, and constantly watches for opportunities in the media. Ling says: ‘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’.

Ling’s advice for aspiring entrepreneurs is to have confidence in yourself and not to 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.

What next?

Ling is already bringing her unique approach to new ventures.

Check out www.lingsmobiles.com – an entirely automated site that runs without human intervention; used car advertising will never be the same again when LingTrader launches; and LINGsWINGS promises to find all those £1 flights you know exist but can never find.

Try this

If you type your first name into Google, what do you get? Try typing ‘Ling’.

Marketing differentiation is not about aligning yourself with your competitors and doing one or two things better or differently.

Ling inspired thoughts for your business:

• Don’t take yourself too seriously
• Make Google spider food
• Make it as easy as possible to do business with you
• Try something different, and commit to it

Contact LINGsCARS:

LINGsCARS.com Ltd
LING World Headquarters
Vance Business Park
Gateshead, NE11 9NE
Tel 0191 460 9444
Fax 0870 486 1130

sales@LINGsCARS.com

www.LINGsCARS.com

The full Ling Valentine interview and extra information can be found in the full article, here.

Bronwyn Durand writes the Marketing Ideaology blog for JupiterJasper Practical Marketing.

Marketing differentiation, Ling Valentine style is a post from: JupiterJasper's Marketing Ideaology blog

Social networking (and the clunky-sounding Web 2.0 catchall) is proving to be a tough nut to crack for marketers. The medium, if you can call it that yet, is all about people expressing themselves and the lifespan of information and its relevance in this world is unbelievably short lived. Using social networks for marketing experiments could be extremely rewarding, a disaster, or worse – a non event.

Some interesting stories doing the rounds are a story of Moonfruit (a hosting service that has a free website creation tool) and Starbucks latest launch of Starbucks icecream through Facebook.

Moonfruit & Twitter
Moonfruit have been doing some good marketing. One of their latest ideas, and certainly the one with most widespread popularity, was to run a competition on micro-blogging site Twitter. Macbooks were up for the winning for the creative use of their brand name in Tweets. It worked like wildfire (and seemingly from Twitter’s perspective, was put out like one too). What a wonderful exercise to take some brilliant learnings from.

You don’t need to be big and powerful to make an impact in your target audience with social media. You need an inspired idea, a very good understanding of the social media platform, and you must be able to manage what happens next. You don’t even need a big budget. But you don’t even qualify if you don’t understand your target audience.

Moonfruit had a wonderful experience, gained massive awareness, and their target market (and more besides) took hold of their brand and made it their own. Their statement on their blog (subsequent to disappearing off the Twitter trending scales) was:
“But given how it has turned out we are also touched by how people have responded to the brand and campaign. We love how they’ve questioned it, played with it, joked about it, sung about it, painted it, made it out of fruit, shouted at it and made it what it is through their participation. We are in awe of the brilliance and creativity of the Twittersphere. So thank you all.” http://www.moonfruitlounge.com/.

Starbucks and Facebook
Starbucks took a more conventional approach in creating a viral wave offering coupons for their new Starbucks icecream through Facebook. Even though this is a US based example, there is no reason why this wouldn’t work anywhere, and I’d be blown away if UK based Starbucks fans didn’t now know all about it too. Their international site describes the promotion for Starbucks® Ice Cream here.

The Facebook page for Starbucks has 3,446,409 fans listed. That is an enormous group of people who have identified themselves as being committed customers, implying their brand loyalty. A ready-made audience to effect a launch of any new idea, assuming they log in to Facebook to see it. All you need is a little of the ‘forward to a friend‘ magic and you suddenly open up untapped parts of your market. WARC says in their article ‘Brands making inroads on social nets’ that ‘more than half of US consumers who regularly use social networking sites have signed up to become “friends” with a brand. What an opportunity.

Thinking about how best to use social media for your marketing? These platforms demand that you have a very good understanding of your target market, or are intent on learning about them from your actions. What is your customer’s motivations for using these social networks?

In some cases they will belong to multiple networks to express the different aspects of who they are. Often their on screen persona is just that, and can even be different between sites. What is very clear is that it is all about participation. If no one passes on your viral idea, it just isn’t viral. If you get no comments on your business’ Facebook page, what is it really doing for you? It clearly isn’t doing anything for your potential customers.

Social networking isn’t just any bandwagon. You need to have a strategy. And a clear idea of what your target audience could get out of the interaction with you. If you can’t offer something that is truly an extension to your brand or business, that gives value, then why are you doing it? If you aren’t in touch with your customers now, then crossing the divide with social networking may leave you pretty exposed. Start smaller if you must. Why not find a way to learn from your customers and give a new way to enjoy your business? Be a little lateral. Try this for an example: If you are a builder, maybe you need to be Facebooking about design trends and economical ideas about rebuilding houses. Or tap into the resources in the local community and do a joint page for potential customers in your local area of work that need you and others of your ilk – you know, the plasterer, the plumber etc. Offer value.

Some points to consider that have been raised by the community analysing social networking trends:

- Which brands aren’t using social media says as much as those that do.
- Its not often about the quality, but the readership.
- The more awareness, the more success, the more precarious being at the top can be.
- What’s popular is rarely what’s good.

Apply it to your business:
* Social network media are a big wake up call to do more to understand your customer, so that you can have an interactive relationship with them. If you aren’t ready to market using these media, you sure can learn more about your customers in terms of their use of them. Which will help you with the marketing you do.
* At a very basic level offering a basic means of sharing feedback is a dialogue starter. Social media may or may not be the ticket for you, but you can reach out to your customer and ask them what they think about you and your products, and if you are very lucky, they will tell you. Be prepared to DO something with what you learn.
* What do people do with your what you sell? Besides buy them. Use that knowledge to help you find your customers, and if you don’t know, find out.

Bronwyn Durand writes the Marketing Ideaology blog for JupiterJasper Practical Marketing.

May the Fruit be with you, and other social networking ideas is a post from: JupiterJasper's Marketing Ideaology blog

A simple journey into London can even present some marketing strategies that are worth evaluating for their relevance to your new or small business.

Educating customers

Public transport companies have the enviable position of being indispensable to the majority of their customers, and so they have several advantages. They spend very little effort in educating their customers – where to find a train station, how to buy a ticket, what time you should take a train. They are reliant on the overwhelming propulsion of your need as a customer to use their service that you will simply do whatever it takes to find out on your own. As a customer, this can be extremely frustrating.

Know what your customers need to know

As a conventional company – finding the balance is key. Surprise and delight your customers by knowing what they need to know (when wanting to buy from you or use your service) and helping them to access that information before they have to hunt for it. The opposite end of the scale is to provide just the right amount of information – your money may be put to better use invested in other marketing efforts rather than multitudes of information leaflets that will not do much more than be tossed in the bin. Present the information in a way that recognises that information you provide is another opportunity to communicate what kind of company you are – what your brand stands for, and the quality of your communication will help you to build a relationship with your customers.

Communicate to manage expectations

Another favourite of mine is the underground minute. The infinity that is waiting the three minutes for your particular tube train to arrive. I believe I am afraid of the effect knowing how long those three minutes actually is in real time will have on my patience. But, and this is the punchline, displaying a waiting time is a way of managing the  expectations of your customers. It is still communication. Consider the difference in the mindset of passengers waiting infinitely for trains that may or may not come comparatively to the simple device that displays how long until the next train (not forgetting that you have created a perfect opportunity to create a revenue opportunity in some alternative advertising space addressing a captive audience).

Use technology to make your customer’s lives easier

A device that I am personally a big fan of is the journey planner. It is my preference as a train user to rather know at least the frequency if not the exact departure and journey times of the train I need to take. I don’t like to waste time, so nothing bugs me more than standing idly on a platform. So putting the journey planner in the hands of the customer that likes to help themselves is a winning way of helping to create a happy interaction with your business and a more satisfied customer. And, of course, it helps you as a business because you don’t have to make as many staff with customer facing skills available to answer questions about the where, what and how of trains.

Apply it to your business:
- Customers that understand how to use your products and service will be happier and better customers. How are you educating your customers?
- Managing customer expectations will save resources and frustration. Are you keeping your customers in the loop?
- Some of your customers may like to help themselves and you could use your customer facing resources where they are more needed. Do you make it as easy as possible for customers to buy from you or use your service?

Bronwyn Durand writes the Marketing Ideaology blog for JupiterJasper Practical Marketing.

Even commuting inspires marketing ideas is a post from: JupiterJasper's Marketing Ideaology blog