Crafting the Yamaha Workshop
The digital marketing team at Yamaha Outboards approached Hoffman York (HY) with a unique problem: we don’t know our boater groups.
Boats are sold and rigged with their outboard- tailored to the boat type, style, needs and capacities. If a boat owner is going out of their way to purchase an all new rig, they do so with intent and purpose of the boat as well as towing, speed and water conditions they will be traversing. With this need in mind, the boat matches the outboard, meaning a professional bass fisher on Lake Superior will need a completely different rig than the Florida Keys charter.
Now back to the question: WHO is buying WHICH boats?
This workshop worked in parallel to a outboard maintenance refresh. The maintenance site known as Maintenance Matters was a place for the maintenance schedules per outboard type, tips and tricks on maintaining your outboard and specialty concerns such as winterization. While we knew all boaters wanted a streamlined experience for their maintenance schedules, we still didn’t know who was working on which boat- or why.
Hoffman York’s consumer insights department ran a Google Insights & Analytics campaign that followed shopping trends, competitor site analysis, consumer interests, SEO tracking and sign-up demographics to form our own insights into the groups we believed to be archetypes, or “a symbolic character or persona used by brands to define their identity and express their values,” per Carl Jung. This is the information I ran with in order to develop an impactful and strategic workshop.
I ran with the basic demographics we pulled from Google Analytics (GA) and curated a new study stemming from the UserTesting.com results for Maintenance Matters (MM). With the use of very particular screener questions based on location and demographic, we were able to filter owners by region based on need (coastal vs. in-land, etc.). From there we narrowed down further which outboards would be recommended by a certified Yamaha retailer for those regional needs. This study was conducted via moderated user testing as well as SME interviews with Yamaha retailers to unlock insights from their experiences with customers.
Let’s get to the good part: the making of the workshop.
We had 2 days to meet the digital team for Yamaha. It’s during peak season where the account team is wrapping up the Miami boat show, and shortly after we would be diving into a whole new realm for these folks: design thinking. New concepts aside, we were about to fly them out and accommodate them to learn the deepest insights we could from a 2 days long sprint of me yapping.
I had rallied the entire consumer insights department to take a piece of the workshop and drive. We were approaching this with stickynote mapping on a semi-open card sort. This means we knew about most* of the categories in advance from our research so we could nudge and facilitate, but we also planned for organic inspiration of these groupings with our stakeholders. This allowed us to confirm and corroborate the findings along the way making sure the team left with well-defined groups.
Day 1: Define our boaters
Each Yamaha marketing lead was tasked to write out ANYTHING they knew about their boaters. And this was pure blissful chaos. Sportsmen, renters, charters, people who own boat homes, you name it I wanted it down on a post-it. We covered the walls of the Harry Hoffman Cafe with dozens of traits about all kinds of boaters. We nudged along as we told them to think about behaviors, things like FOMO and having the fastest bass boat on the lake. Truly a creative free-fall that I think was perfectly paired over catered lunch and followed by some adult beverages.
Day 2: Define our groups
Coming out of Day 1 we had one last full 8hr sprint to relate the traits about our boaters into categories. This was the strategic and critical thinking portion of the workshop, so it was best to do after dipping our toes the day before.
We organized our stickies into behaviors and descriptions. This meant we localized traits such as ‘sports fisherman’ with ‘competitive’ or ‘top-of-the-line outboard model’.
Once all those dozens of stickies were organized, we named like categories. Things like Cabin Cruisers, Special Use and Watersports, Family, Recreational, and Entertainment.
We took a look at each categories to identify any overlap. For instance Family boaters and Recreational boaters might not be the same but they were similar.
We took a narrow look at each group or coupled group (Cabin Cruisers vs. Family/Rec/Entertainment) and created an empathy map for each. We wanted to relate what a boater says, thinks, does and feels to the boat purchasing process as well as maintaining their rig. This would directly translate for MM work.
Lastly, we took each parent group (e.g. Cabin Cruisers) and related them to Yamaha’s purchasing and retention model which at the time was: Attention, Consideration, Purchase, Service and Loyalty. In each category we broke down these relationships into: Feeling & Saying, Actions & Company Opportunities.
The Outcome
The Yamaha marketing team said the workshop was exhaustive… but that they had never even imagined thinking like that would create a tangible marketing campaign strategy to target their boat owners. With this insight they walked away with a portfolio piece that they used to create the next Gen marketing for their company, all within their goals and ambitions. They walked away educated and empowered, but most of all grateful for the deep dive analysis we were able to model them in person.
