Understanding our customers is the key to delivering successful products. We use several strategies for listening to our customers, anticipating their needs and delivering products they will love.
Developing Target Customers and Brand Meanings
Strengthening the Company's focus on consumers is an integral part of Ford's Way Forward plan (see Financial Health section) to deliver better products and strengthen the business. Ford's marketing experts have been working diligently to ensure that all employees know what each of our brands stands for and who their target customers are, so they can use that information to develop the right product, for the right person, at the right time.
Our marketing experts use an intensive research and analysis process to understand who our potential customers are, what they value and what they want in a vehicle. Using the information they have gathered, they have defined a "brand DNA" and "target customer" for each of our main brands. These overall brand DNAs and target customers are used to develop all our new products. Ultimately, each individual product is also assigned its own specific DNA and target customer. The brand DNA and target customer profiles go beyond simple demographic information such as age, gender and income; we build complete profiles of each target customer, including what they like to do, what music they listen to and where they shop. This approach gives us a focus on exactly what we're trying to accomplish with each vehicle. We know who the customer is, we know what emotional and functional elements we want in the vehicle, and the entire vehicle team works together to develop a vehicle that our target customers will want.
Tracking Future Consumer Trends
We also track emerging trends that we believe will influence what consumers will want in the future. We have an internal global trends and futuring network made up of people across the Company who have their finger on the pulse of consumer interests and social and political trends. This group manages a database of future trends they believe will affect the Company and our consumers.
In addition to this internal network, we engage in extensive scenario-planning exercises with internal and external thought leaders to understand where the world is heading and what it will mean for consumers' choices about vehicles and mobility. We include thought leaders from outside the auto industry as well as industry experts to make sure we get a broad and comprehensive vision of possible future trends. We have used these exercises to develop several scenarios for how the world may look in the future and how this will impact our consumers and our industry. We are using these scenarios and trends throughout our marketing, product development, research and design organizations to guide future product and technology developments.
One of the primary consumer trends we are following is an increasing interest in environmental and social issues, and an increasing desire to purchase products that have positive environmental and social impacts. We call this trend "ethical consumerism," and our preliminary research shows that it is on the rise globally. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, people are becoming more aware of how their actions affect one another. While people are generally not willing to compromise on performance or affordability, they want products that come from ethical companies and have positive environmental and social impacts. One example of this trend is the rise in popularity of fair-trade-certified, organic-certified and other products that can claim to have positive social, environmental and health impacts. The evidence of this trend provides strong motivation and justification for us to continue our work on developing and implementing more sustainable products and services.
