Malaysia is top market for luxury car brands in South East Asia

updated: 15/10/2015; 13/10/2015

The biggest car market in ASEAN is Indonesia (sales of 830096 units in 2014) followed by Thailand (with 579273 units sold) and Malaysia (444551 units sold) (ASEAN automative federation, 2014).

However, when it comes to luxury car brands, my research shows that Malaysia is the leading country in ASEAN.

For example, take the BMW group. 2014 was a fantastic year for them with record breaking sales through out the World (including the 3 countries listed above) with 2,117,965 BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce vehicles sold. Let us compare the sales in these 3 countries:

1. Indonesia: 9,046 vehicles, comprising 7,808 BMWs, 655 MINIs and 583 BMW Motorrads
2. Thailand; 8,386 vehicles of both BMW and MINI brands
3. Malaysia: 9,419 vehicles with monthly sales upwards of 900 units.

Mercedes-Benz, which is the leading premium car brand in all the three countries also shows a similar trend.

Mercedes-Benz Thailand sold more vehicles with 11,524 units sold as compared to Malaysia (a record-breaking 9,419 vehicles) in 2014. In the first five months of this year, Mercedes-Benz Thailand took the lead in the premium car segment in the country with sales record of 4108 units. However, Mercedes-Benz Malaysia recorded their all-time sales record in the first quarter of 2015 with 5163 units passenger cars sold. This is also higher than in Indonesia which saw sales of 1800 cars between January and July 2015.

Though I cannot generalise based on sales figures of only two luxury car makers, preliminary results from other luxury companies also show that Malaysia is one of the top markets for their cars as well in the ASEAN region.

This thus leads to some interesting questions. Besides population and income, what do marketers also need to take into account when it comes to luxury products?

Sources:

• http://www.bmw.co.th/th/en/general/bmwinsight/news_read.php?id=565&year=
• https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/asia/pressDetail.html?title=bmw-group-indonesia-reports-significant-growth-in-volume-in-2013&outputChannelId=16&id=T0166566EN&left_menu_item=node__4100
• http://paultan.org/2015/01/14/mercedes-benz-malaysia-record-sales-2014/
• http://paultan.org/2015/06/03/mercedes-benz-malaysia-best-ever-sales-in-may-15/
• http://www.mercedes-benz.com.my/content/media_library/malaysia/media_library/About_Us/events___sponsorship/2015_Events/pr-1st-half-sales-pdf.object-Single-MEDIA.tmp/MBM1H2015NewsRelease7Jul15.pdf

The new Mercede-Benz interactive ad campaign

Check out the late advertising campaign from Mercedes-Benz promoting their new A-Class model. It is the first to use Twitter, the micro-blogging tool, in this way.

They are asking Twitter users to determine the outcome of a TV ad which will be aired for the first time during this weeks X Factor.

According to the storyline, a young musician and his female friend is trying to get to a gig driving the new Mercedes and chased by the police. There are several possible endings and Twitter users decide the outcome using the tag #YOUDRIVE in their tweets.

VW engaging customers via social media

Volkswagen, the German car maker is actively targeting customers on Facebook by getting them involved in their advertising campaigns. No, I am not talking about customer generated advertising which is a popular buzz word today but rather about getting customers to say nice things about the brand or product (positive testimonials) and using these in their advertising campaigns.

This is not a new concept in advertising and businesses and organisations often use positive testimonials to promote their products. However, it is the way that VW is actively soliciting and appealing to the "ego" of customers or the novelty effect and making innovative use of the technology, which is quite interesting.

I took part in two of their campaigns - just for the experience.

The first one was the " Beetle Billboard Times Square Experience". All I had to do was "like" the new Beetle (targeted at Men) and my face appeared live on the Volkswagen Beetle Billboard in Times Square, New York for a few seconds. This was in October last year.

The second campaign was the Volkswagen "Big up the up!". All we had to do was say something nice about the new VW up! car ("bigged up the new up!") and they would then feature your FB profile on huge digital posters across the UK.

A great way to get customers engaged with the brand and product. Do you agree? Any possible issues?