Shifting gears: How the AA uses insights to drive decisions

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If your car suddenly breaks down on a dimly lit, winding country road, there is a good chance the AA will be your first call to get you back up and running. Since 1905, the motoring organisation has been rescuing drivers of all kinds, acting as a de facto ‘fourth emergency service’. As the age of the petrol car winds to an end, however, the company is at a crossroads, and insights are helping its shift to a new future.

When Robert Gruszka, senior consumer research manager, joined the AA in 2015, it was looking for a fresh start. The company has long been an icon of British motoring, but older customers formed a large part of its membership, and the company had been absent from television and radio advertising for a long time.

The biggest issue remains the radical changes on the horizon for the car industry. Electric vehicles, and the ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars in the UK from 2030, threaten to shrink the roadside-assistance industry. Add to this the move towards car sharing, leasing and other modes of transport.

“We needed to put a line in the sand and re-establish ourselves – both in terms of consumer awareness and perceptions of who we are – but also define where we wanted to go,” says Gruszka. “We were talking in a language that was seen as outdated.”

Strategy

Gruszka is the only member of the AA’s consumer research team, and reports directly to the group marketing director. His status as the only pure researcher at the business means he is dependent on the use of contractors and external agencies. There are also separate insights and user experience teams, and a customer journey insights team.

Insight sits within the marketing department at the AA, and has a predominant focus on brand and strategy, as well as marketing communications issues such as creative development insights and market tracking.

The insight function may be small, but it plays an important role in the strategic direction of the company, argues Gruszka, because of the AA’s relatively flat structure and the way the senior leadership team uses insights.

“When I joined, business decisions were being made off the back of several focus groups, and we decided to embed a thorough programme of audience understanding to drive our strategic decision-making across the business,” says Gruszka.

“Most strategic decisions are made with the view that we kick off with insights and research, whether that be development of a new proposition, optimising messaging, or changes to strategy. That, hopefully, doesn’t stifle the spark of creativity from colleagues, and people still make decisions based on their expertise and industry specialism and knowledge. But it is all supported through a lens of insight and consumer response.”

The AA’s segmentations now have access to more than 200 behavioural attributes, and a mixture of internal and external attitudinal survey data. The organisation recently updated its segmentation to better understand the alignment of its membership and customers with new business objectives.

According to Gruszka, the new segmentation brought to life, through direct consumer experiences, the role of the AA brand as an enabler for different aspects of people’s driving lives. As it is a membership organisation, the AA can also use its internal databases for research.

The segmentation update, conducted before and during the first Covid-19 lockdown in the UK, has allowed a more expansive approach to sharing insights internally, says Gruszka. The nature of the pandemic restrictions, which enforced home working for a large section of the population, meant the results had to be delivered in smaller regular updates for relevant internal stakeholders. “It worked really well, as you could deliver dedicated insight into a specific segment, to a wider range of colleagues, in bite-sized chunks in videos and presentations,” explains Gruszka.

Strat7 ResearchBods runs the AA’s consumer panels (see below, ‘In the driver’s seat’), and creative agency Adam and Eve supports brand strategy. Old Street Data Science also assists Gruszka on key strategic quantitative projects, and Boxclever and Savanta work on tactical and proposition-based activities, both quantitative and qualitative. One Minute to Midnight and Lucid are among the qualitative specialists with which the AA works.

The pandemic has presented opportunities to disseminate insight more widely. The organisation’s Covid-19 tracker – which started as bi-weekly, but is now monthly – has been widely shared internally via email, and Gruszka has been working on a regular infographic that summarises insights around commercial and brand strategy discussions. He says: “I have been invited to various groups, Teams chats and local meetings that, in a face-to-face environment, I might not have experienced.”

A changing world

The updated segmentation is a central part of the AA’s modernisation. “Through embedding a new segmentation understanding modern drivers and the consumer landscape, it gave us the platform from which we could then start to build a relevant brand strategy and reinvent ourselves into a modern brand that faced a younger audience,” says Gruszka.

The organisation has begun a further project focused on roadside member retention and brand messaging. The work involves researching the messaging and marketing around its roadside maintenance business, which accounts for two-thirds of group revenue. The research will examine the company’s roadside retention and acquisition, roadside product and direct response marketing communications, and target segments.

“As cars become more reliable and the introduction of electric vehicle technology means there are fewer parts that go wrong, breakdown is likely to recede,” Gruszka explains. “We need to look at other opportunities to support people across their driving lives, whether that be through suitable financial services – such as car leasing or smart leasing – or looking at car servicing and repairs as opportunities to continue our expertise.”

The changing world in which the AA finds itself also informed the ‘That Feeling’ campaign, produced with creative testing partner Acacia Avenue. While responsive to the pandemic and the end of the first lockdown in the summer of 2020, the campaign is the first from the AA that draws on other aspects of driving life, speaking more about helping customers to get on with driving, rather than reactions to accidents or breakdowns. It was the first advert from the organisation that did not feature a patrol or an AA van.

‘That Feeling’ has been the most effective AA brand campaign launch based on short-term business sales, the company says. It has been the most watched AA campaign on YouTube and had a 74% increase in positive engagement compared with the AA’s previous advertising campaigns.

These projects, including the That Feeling campaign, are building the narrative head of a campaign focused on the freedom of driving, according to Gruszka. While postponed until 2022 because of the pandemic, work has begun, with Murmur appointed to run a cultural exploration. Gruszka says his ultimate aim is to ensure insights remain core to decision-making at the AA as it grapples with the ever increasing commoditisation of the breakdown industry. “We are building up a body of work that is underpinning key strategic activity maintaining our category leadership,” he says. “There are opportunities as the brand plays out its vision for insight to be used much more broadly.”

The objective has been to speed up employees’ route to insight and allow teams to speak directly to consumers through polls, online groups or other methodologies, as well as adding ‘insight champions’ within category teams. In the meantime? It’s about helping keep people on the road.

“Car manufacturers sell people the dream of owning a car,” Gruszka says. “We are there to support people through the reality of ownership and maintaining the promise of freedom offered through driving.”

This article was first published in the April 2021 issue of Impact.