Nissan
Background
The new Nissan Ireland website is a hugely ambitious website that successfully places Nissan's Irish web presence at the forefront of online Irish Motoring. The site delivers over 300 web pages of high-quality content, technical data and media including galleries and Flash animated movies focusing on each vehicle (commercial and passenger) representing the entire Nissan Ireland range.
Objectives
- Increases sales of Nissan vehicles in the Irish market by marketing the Nissan vehicle range and services online in a detailed, usable and attractive format.
- Further enhance the excellent reputation Nissan have for customer communication and support throughout the lifecycle of vehicle ownership.
- Generate leads (fed into the Lead Management Process and directly to dealers)
- Strengthen the Nissan brand (e.g., awareness, relevance, messaging and positioning)
- Provide a new, innovative image of Nissan to be fully supported in a major marketing campaign with the National television campaign and Nissan Irish Open.
- Improve/provide customer access to desired Nissan information
- Support the administrative ROI (e.g., reduce operations costs/increase efficiency)
- Enhance shareholder communications and value
- Enhance analyst communications
Strategy
Continuum and Nissan worked in partnership on the Visual Identity strategy for the new nissan.ie website for over 18 months to ensure that it made a BIG impression on its audience. The visual designs, the navigation systems, the flow and tone of content - all of these things affect how customers perceive Nissan, their vehicles and services. So we ensured that our Visual Identity strategy for Nissan included all of the elements that work together to craft the Nissan brand experience online.
Essentially, this governed how the new Nissan.ie Web site looks, behaves, and what it offers its broad and varied audience. During our user reviews and end user acceptance testing, we had to ensure the essence, promise, and personality of Nissan.ie had to remain consistent in order to protect the Irish Nissan brand integrity, and the overall Global Nissan brand value of "bold and thoughtful".
Understanding driven by customers:
Nissan customers experience a relationship with their vehicle, which is referred to and modelled as the "Lifecycle of vehicle ownership". This process contains six major phases: Exposure, Research, Purchase, Drive, Maintain and Change.
From our review of the statistics of the previous Nissan.ie websites over the past 4 years, it demonstrates that internet use is currently most prominent in the Research phase of this lifecycle.
Primary users of Nissan's B2C site (Nissan.ie) are those with an active desire to buy a new car. Nissan.ie is a key information source for Nissan customers to support their decision-making process, and to prepare themselves for the experience of negotiation and purchase.
Understanding this lifecycle allowed us to identify key points of opportunity to support the customer in their relationship with Nissan. Once we identified their customers' needs throughout the lifecycle, we fully tailored the new website architecture, content and design to better meet these needs through the user journey experience.
Results
The site proactively addresses user needs through the four primary phases of the lifecycle of ownership. These phases include: Exposure, Research, Purchase, and Drive.
The main focus of the site supports users in the Research phase of the Lifecycle, while to a lesser extent supporting their needs in the other phases. The Nissan.ie site supports users' research needs by providing them with an accurate, credible information source that contains all relevant information, while also providing the option of guiding them through various decision-making purchase scenarios. This approach best suits the current market conditions to satisfy all customer expectations at every point in the Lifecycle of Ownership.
The two primary goals of the Nissan.ie information architecture were to make sure the site is 1) useful and 2) usable, by addressing the following:
Useful
- Site is organised by user goals. (determined via user journey workshops)
- Content is personally relevant. (user scenario modelling)
- Purpose of the site is clear. (marketing driven)
Usable
- Information is easy to find. (end user monitoring)
- Navigation is intuitive. (end user monitoring)
- Help is accessible from every page.
- Text is legible and clear. (end user acceptance)
- Names of features and interactions are clear and consistent.
- Vehicles
Vehicles
The Vehicles section contains all vehicle information and answers the questions "What does Nissan sell?" and "What is unique about it?". This again supports the users during the "Research" stage of the Lifecycle and provides them with accurate information about vehicles they may be considering for purchase. The metaphor for this section is that it acts as a "customer catalogue" for Nissan. Examples of the type of information and functionality this section includes are vehicle line-up, overviews, attribute information, specifications, comparisons, and image gallery.
The Nissan B2C website summarises their promise of the Nissan Brand Identity. It very powerfully puts the Nissan Brand Identity into words and images and serves as the centrepiece of their public message internally and externally.