PROFILE: Boyhood passions drawing and cars help David Goggins go places

Campaign Asia-Pacific caught up with Goggins at a café in a busy shopping mall in Hong Kong recently as he stopped by after a business meeting in Shenzhen. We took a quick drive down the memory lane of his more than 25 years in international car marketing.

“My life and career is a combination of accidents, design and karma,” Goggins said, explaining that he has been lucky in being able to work in the luxury end of the car market—with Bentley, BMW, Volkswagen and Land Rover; in England, Italy, America and China. His latest role is in the largest region for FAW-VW—North China, where it sells 300,000 cars a year.

As a young child growing up in Southern England, Goggins found two things he loved—drawing and cars. "When I was 18, I had a sense of what I want to do: car design, a combination of creativity and my love of cars," he said.

As a student, he joined a course at Brighton University, half of which was spent in Turin Polytechnic in Northern Italy, one of the best technical institutes in Europe with a very good reputation for engineering and design, while the other half was spent in England studying business and marketing.

After a quarter century in the car marketing industry, he still finds the business addictive and fascinating, not just from the marketing side, but also in sales, dealer networks, after sales and the opportunity to meet colourful people, including celebrities, sports stars, and luxury-end customers. 

Goggins described his Bentley customers as typically successful people who are in a position to spend upward of US$200,00 on a car. "Chances are they are good at something in life," he added.

After working for VW and Bentley for over seven years in America, where he was vice-president of marketing and product strategy, the company asked him what he wanted to do next. 

Asia sprang to mind as the last outstanding career destination, even though he already had global responsibility. He had never been based in Asia, and in the previous decade China had become the centre of the Asian economy.

He was offered a job as VP of marketing strategy role with FAW-VW in Changchun in North-Eastern China, which Goggins joked is not the best place to observe the leading edge of change in consumer behaviour. But he spent lots of time in Beijing and Shanghai with the creative agencies.

Goggins recalled that when he first came to China in 2009, it struck him how similar all communications in the car category were, with the same look and feel, as the whole area of brand communications was new to China with its emerging consumer society.

“It was impossible to tell the difference in advertising among 10 to 15 car ads. Typical communications in car ads showed an empty city with a guy behind the wheel, changing shots... Car with girl driving past, then leaving the city,” he said.

“[There was a] lack of confidence to do something differently,” Goggins said. "Being different and standing out is not something valued in Chinese culture, it is about fitting and blending in.”

However, creative marketing is what cuts through the competition, he strongly believes. “What I learned is you have to have creative excellence if you want to be noticed, otherwise customers are not going to notice your products and brands.”

By working with DMG, O&R and Ogilvy in China, Goggins wanted to start making FAW-VW communications to the standards of the Classic VW ads, which are fun to watch, memorable and tell rich stories with a quirky and humorous twist. There was no reason why China could not create very distinctive ads, he said.

On China's business environment, he pointed out that the government was very smart—it first opened up its car market to foreign companies by imposing a joint venture rule, which allowed local brands to get knowledge from foreign companies. This knowledge transfer enabled local brands to develop locally manufactured car products.

Chinese consumers are hungry for established global brands such as Volkswagen, BMW and Audi, while Chinese brands, such as Geely, BYD, Great Wall and Roewe, are still very young in the car business and are less popular. The local brands have yet to build up the engineering and technical design expertise that the established foreign brands have, said Goggins.

He pointed out that European brands like Mercedes-Benz have been around for 120 years, while those in the US American have existed for 100 to 110 years. Japan's car industry is about 60 years old, Korea's car industry around 40, while China's is only about 15 to 20 years old.

European and Japanese car products are very advanced in engineering technology, and it is hard for Chinese brands to leapfrog that, but there are opportunities for the Chinese car industry and government to invest heavily in electric vehicle technology, Goggins said.

In China, up to now demand has been exceeding supply, as a huge amount of wealth has been generated in recent years, but this is changing fast. Goggins said the market is expected to grow at eight per cent this year, similar to last year.

Chinese consumers’ expectations are changing very fast as China opens up, as they experience more international brands, travel more and get retail and customer experiences outside of China.

He believes that brands that stand out have emotional appeal, and not just rational appeal on function and price. "Companies and brands that gain a reputation by offering excellence customer service satisfaction would continue to do business and strive in this crowded marketplace."

He said it is the responsibility of clients to be very clear what the brand stand for, and what they trying to say to customers. He advises agency people to not assume that clients always know what they want. "Sometimes clients are not very good at briefing, being clear in what they are trying to sell or say."

Goggins, who is fluent in Italian, French and ‘taxi Putgonhua’, said he has taken something from every culture where he has lived. In England, it revolved around humour. From Italy, he learned the love of food and wine, and work-life balance, while in the US, he learned the expectations of a high-service culture, and the directness of American business culture.

"In China, I’ve learned the importance and value of relationships. You can’t get by in China on skills and work alone, you have to build personal relationship, take time to get to know and understand people, build and grow the working relationship," he said.