Sales and Marketing
We regard ourselves as an innovative and sustainable mobility provider for all commercial and private customers worldwide – with a product portfolio encompassing our successful brands and innovative financial services.
Together with their sales partners and importers, our passenger car brands agreed on a procedure for integrating state-of-the-art products and services into the sales network. The priority thereby is the safe and legally compliant handling of customer data and the way in which this is processed for digital products and services or in connection with the vehicle purchase. The legal requirements for handling customer data have been tightened in many countries. At the same time, the Group is launching a growing number of vehicles that are connected to the internet where available and depending on a vehicle’s features. We are increasingly investing in distribution systems and processes with the goal of further digitalizing and improving the individual customer experience in all distribution channels. The Volkswagen Group’s financial strength and profitability is attributable to an extensive portfolio of strong brands. We want to continuously sharpen the brand profiles and to distinguish as clearly as possible between the customer segments served by the brands, supplementing them as required with tailored solutions. Our aim is to achieve high market saturation with great efficiency and a low level of brand cannibalization. To this end, we have established automobile-specific customer segmentation to steer and improve the positioning of our brands, which we consistently apply throughout the strategy and product process.
As part of our NEW AUTO strategy, we have introduced strategic base initiatives for China as the largest single market and North America as the market with the greatest growth potential due to their considerable strategic importance for the Volkswagen Group. We have used the Group strategy as the foundation for our new functional area strategy called NEW SALES 2030, which forms the basis for transforming our sales activities in the direction of a mobility provider. The aim of NEW SALES 2030 is to enable us to provide an even more flexible and targeted response to our customers’ wishes and leverage additional revenue potential, for example through digital business models.
With regard to its NEW AUTO strategy, Volkswagen hit another milestone as part of the “Volkswagen Group Mobility” tech initiative in July 2022 with the closing of the transaction with Europcar. This successful joint acquisition with two consortium partners is important in helping to drive the growth of the Volkswagen Group in vehicle-on-demand (VoD) services. Europcar is to become a cornerstone of a product portfolio that will cover customers’ mobility needs from vehicle sharing for a few hours to subscription for multiple months. Our expectation is that most people will still prefer individual mobility by 2030 but the focus will be more on using and less on owning vehicles. The Volkswagen Group is aiming to participate in the global market for mobility services, which is expected to grow rapidly.
Also in the area of sales and marketing, we are aware of our responsibility towards the climate and the environment. In addition to the broad range of all-electric vehicles and hybrid models, we kicked off the goTOzero retail project that is focused on decarbonizing our entire sales network and increasing its ESG performance, helping our sales partners to move over to a climate-neutral business model. As a result, the carbon footprint of our sales network is to be reduced by at least 30% by 2030 compared with 2020. In order to identify and successfully implement the right measures, we have produced manuals, training courses and marketing materials for our partners. In addition, a certification model has been established for the entire sales network in response to both regulatory requirements and customer expectations.
Customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and customer conquest
The Volkswagen Group aims its sales activities at exciting its customers. This is our top priority, as satisfied customers remain loyal to our brands and recommend our products and services to others. For this we measure customer satisfaction with our brands at different customer contact points and make it a subject of discussion at Board committee meetings. In addition to satisfaction with our products and services, we value our customers’ emotional connection to our brands. It is important for us to retain customers and win new ones. To measure our success in this area, we compile and analyze strategic indicators for the passenger car-producing brands: the loyalty rate represents the proportion of customers of our passenger car brands who have bought another Group model. Thanks to their faithful customers, the Volkswagen Passenger Cars and Porsche brands have remained in the upper loyalty rankings of the core European markets in comparison with their competitors for a number of years. Audi and Škoda also have above-average customer loyalty ratings. Compared to other manufacturer groups, the Volkswagen Group continues to hold a top spot in the core European markets in terms of loyalty. The conquest rate shows the share of newly acquired passenger car customers as a proportion of a brand-specific selection of competitors. The Volkswagen Passenger Cars and Audi brands improved their conquest rates in 2023, while the figures for Škoda and Porsche were on a level with the previous year.
In the core European markets, brand image and confidence in the Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand stabilized above the level for the market as a whole in 2023. Audi and Porsche continue to occupy top places in the image ranking.
E-mobility and digitalization in Group Sales
As part of our electrification campaign, we aim to offer our customers worldwide around 50 completely battery-electric vehicles by 2030. This campaign will be complemented by vehicle-related, customer-focused offerings, such as customized charging infrastructure solutions and mobile online services. The Volkswagen Group is thus transforming from an automotive manufacturer into a mobility service provider. This poses new challenges for Sales.
Digitalization provides many opportunities for Sales, including improved customer contact. Our actions are guided by a clearly defined strategy that requires extensive cooperation between the brands and markets to achieve the greatest possible synergies. Our aim here is to create a completely new product experience for the customers of our brands – one which impresses with a seamless communication process, from the initial interest in purchasing a vehicle, to servicing and ultimately to the sale of the used car. In doing so, we are opening up new business models relating to the connected vehicle – in particular with regard to mobility and other services. Vehicles are becoming an integral part of the customer’s digital world of experience.
We also align our internal processes and structures to the methods and new forms of working created by digital innovation. This results in project teams operating across different business areas, new forms of cooperation, a more intensive relationship with the international start-up scene, a consolidation of venture capital expertise – as a form of supporting innovative ideas and business models – and new lean systems and cloud-based IT solutions.
Car subscription
Volkswagen Financial Services AG expanded the portfolio of mobility services offered by the Volkswagen Group and its brands in 2023. Progress has been made particularly in the collaboration with the Europcar Mobility Group (EMG). Numerous joint projects worldwide are currently being worked on, from mobility services for fleet customers to cooperation on the marketing of used vehicles.
The Volkswagen Financial Services AG mobility platform is continuously enlarging its portfolio of mobility services for the Group brands. Its solutions offer the use of vehicles for anything from minutes to years. Particularly noteworthy is the expansion of flexible subscription products, which progressed as planned in 2023. In Germany, the portfolio was expanded to include the Škoda brand. September 2023 saw the launch of the Volkswagen Abonnement, a subscription service also offered through EMG for the Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand in France.
Fleet customer business
Business relationships with fleet customers are often long-term partnerships. In a volatile environment, this customer group provides greater stability for sales of well-equipped, profitable vehicle models than the private customer segment.
The Volkswagen Group has an established base of business fleet customers, especially in Germany and the rest of Europe. Our extensive product range enables us to satisfy their individual mobility needs from a single source.
In an overall passenger car market in Germany that grew by 7.3% in the reporting year, business fleet customers accounted for 21.4 (18.8)% of total registrations. The Volkswagen Group’s share of this customer segment increased to 47.0 (43.5)%. Outside Germany, the Group’s share of registrations by fleet customers in Europe was 27.6 (25.7)%. This shows that fleet customers’ confidence in the Group remains at a high level. We were able to consolidate our strong market position in the fleet customer business in Europe.
After Sales and Service
In the after-sales business, we regard ourselves as a complete provider of all products and services relevant to customers. Together with our partners, our mission is to ensure lifelong mobility for our customers and vehicles. We are therefore continuously expanding our portfolio of tailor-made offers and services with the aim of improving customer experience and the satisfaction of our customers. The partner businesses also offer a comprehensive portfolio of services in all vehicle classes.
In After Sales, we are supporting the changing world of mobility and our systematic focus on e-mobility by developing new services and innovative concepts. As the Group transforms from vehicle manufacturer to a leading, global provider of sustainable mobility, our software company CARIAD is working on the development of the future software architecture for our vehicles. With the resulting connectivity services, we will also be able to generate synergies in After Sales across all the Volkswagen Group’s brands and take advantage of new opportunities to boost customer loyalty.
In addition to individual service, the timely provision of genuine parts is essential to assure passenger car customer satisfaction in After Sales. The genuine parts supplied by our passenger car brands and the expertise of the service centers stand for the quality, safety and value retention of our customers’ vehicles. With our global after sales network including more than 130 of our own warehouses, we are creating the prerequisites to supply almost all our authorized service facilities around the world within 24 hours. Owing to disruptions in supply chains we were unable to fully guarantee in-time delivery of replacement parts in certain cases during the reporting year.
In the Digital After Sales project, we are modernizing processes and IT systems in After Sales. By adopting an approach that focuses product and service development on the individual needs of both dealers and customers, we aim to reduce the time needed for administrative tasks at the dealers through automated, interrelated services and also to stabilize existing IT systems and boost efficiency. In addition, innovative digital after-sales services will improve the customer experience.
Around the world, our commercial vehicles business also prides itself on products of quality and on customer focus. Our range of trucks, buses and engines is complemented by services that aim to guarantee fuel efficiency, reliability and wide vehicle availability. By offering vehicles equipped with an all-electric or hybrid drive system, we take into account both customers’ wishes and our responsibility to contribute to emission-free transporttation. Workshop service and service contracts are intended to offer customers a high degree of certainty, in addition to a high level of quality. We are reducing servicing times and costs with a view to the vehicles’ total operating costs.
In the Power Engineering segment, we help our customers to secure the availability of machinery with MAN PrimeServ. The global network of more than 100 PrimeServ locations stands for excellent customer focus and offers, among other things, replacement parts of genuine-part quality, qualified technical service and long-term maintenance contracts.