How Motorway plans to shake up the car marketplace sector

Naomi Walkland joined Motorway.com almost a year ago. It was not an obvious move. She had previously led the marketing for Bumble, taking the dating app into 15 new countries during her three years there.

At the same time, she's been involved with brands such as Spotify and By Rotation during its rapid growth in the circular fashion space. In short, a move to the car marketplace sector was a surprise. "I get asked, personally and professionally, 'You've gone from dating to cars, like, what!?'" she jokes. "But there are a number of things that really drew me.

First and foremost, it was just the vision to take an industry that needs revolutionizing and accelerate that through technology. Also, there are very few industries at this scale. The used car market is about GBP100bn and it's predicted to grow to GBP180bn by 2027.

The retail industry is about GBP500bn, so you can see that it's such a vast industry. There's just so much growth. And, as a marketer, it felt like one industry that hadn't really been disrupted."

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Walkland was given a carte blanche by the founders to refresh the brand identity and communications strategy.

She was emboldened by the positive reviews from sellers, buyers and dealerships alike, while customer research told her the "easy, seamless" experience was the story Motorway.com had not been telling. Market leader Autotrader is coming to the end of one of the biggest marketing campaigns in its history. Called 'Found AT,' the work launched last August with the aim of reaching 96% of the UK population with a message on the volume of new cars on its platform.

Meanwhile, We Buy Any Car has been riding high on the phenomenal success of a campaign by Brothers and Sisters that focused on the feeling after a sale has gone through.

Advertisement "With the market being so, so saturated, it was a good moment to be really laser sharp on who we are and what we stand for. That led us to this pivotal moment of really changing our approach," she says.

She hired two industry titans to support the plan: TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, with which she previously worked at Bumble, to lead brand positioning and strategy and Uncommon for the advertising push. The work done behind the scenes on refreshing the brand's visual and voice identity has culminated in a new campaign, 'It's not magic, It's Motorway,' which launched across the UK this week and spans TV, BVOD, OOH, YouTube, radio, social and display. It tackles the often-painful process of selling a car, showcasing how Motorway's technology makes it easier to sell on its platform.

Walkland says she wanted to inject "emotion" into a category that so often lacks it. She adds: "What really, really impressed me was Uncommon's ability to take a really powerful campaign platform and put it all the way through the funnel. And it showed me that it understood this isn't just about making fame but making work that works.

It was a really good indication that it understood the business, the potential and what we needed to deliver."

Marrying product and marketing teams

Over the past few years, the company was "innovating so much," she says, but it wasn't speaking to its brand leaders about how they could tell that story to customers. Fixing that has been a priority. In the nine months that Walkland has been at the company, she has used her past tech experience to bring the product and marketing teams closer together.

"It's a lot more advanced in tech companies where [product marketing] is such a disciplined focus," she says. "My experience in tech and building that out with the team has been a new thing that we're trying to do - we want to take our understanding of the customer and tell that story on the product side." This campaign is a good example of how it has tried to show new developments through creative execution, such as app alerts displayed in the OOH. "For me, that is a key relationship for us because you can do all the great work in the world, but if your product experience and marketing experience are not matching up, you've got a real problem." The campaign will run from March 21 for the next 12 months.

Walkland declined to comment on spend but said it was receiving a significant investment over the coming year.

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