challenging business model in telematics
TRANSCRIPT
Business Models in Telematics
Interview with Ralf Hug and NAVIBIZ China
The 2012 Telematics@China Tour in Inner Mongolia from Sep 13th – 16th, 2012
will cover the challenging business models within Telematics
Interview published in Chinese on Navibiz: http://bit.ly/OsVxid
Ralf Hug – President, Trajectory Group LLC Ralf is President of the Trajectory Group, a strategic advisory, business development and marketing consulting services firm with deep expertise in the automotive telematics space. He helps clients stay on the trajectory of success by shaping compelling business models, attractive value propositions and winning business and marketing strategies.
Previously Ralf was VP Marketing & Product Management at Airbiquity, a leading cloud platform for connected vehicles. Ralf was also VP of Marketing & Product Management at Navigon, a leading software navigation company, Director of Automotive Marketing at Garmin and Director of the Accessories and Telematics business at Mercedes-‐Benz USA.
Ralf Hug is based in Chicago, Illinois USA, holds a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA) in marketing and finance from the University of Bayreuth in Germany, and speaks fluent English and German. Connect with Ralf via www.trajectorygroup.com or the social network LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ralfhug.
NAVIBIZ: Ralf, you will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Telematics@China tour event in Inner Mongolia, China on business models in Telematics. What are the key business models in Telematics today?
Ralf: Up to now, the dominant way to monetize telematics has been through a service profit model. The hardware and a free trial are included as part of the vehicle purchase. After the free trial expires – typically 6-‐12 months for telematics services, a monthly or annual subscription is required. GM Onstar, Mercedes-‐Benz mbrace, and Hyundai Bluelink among others have adopted this model.
The willingness to pay a subscription for telematics services, however, has been somewhat disappointing with very high churn rates after the initial free trial.
Other OEMs, such as Ford with Ford Sync, which is a Bluetooth-‐based system, have bundled hardware and services into the vehicle price by offering services for free during the warranty period, which is around 3 years and typically also matches an average car ownership cycle.
This model seems to provide a much simpler and more compelling consumer experience. Although offering lesser services, Ford has cleverly marketed the system as an important and unique differentiator closely tied to the Ford brand (“Ford Sync”) that should help sell more vehicles.
BMW with BMW Assist is another variation, which also offers hardware and services bundled during the warranty period with an embedded hardware system. The system offers similar safety and convenience services as Onstar or mbrace. Although BMW does not heavily market or brand BMW Assist, having connectivity across many vehicles over a longer period of time seems to be a major value driver for OEMs in regards to remote diagnostics and remote software upgrades as well as CRM activities.
To summarize some of the key models in use:
a) Service Profit Model with subscription
b) Increase Vehicle Sales with built-‐in hardware and services
c) Data Monetization from Telematics platform
d) Customer and Vehicle Relationship Management
NAVIBIZ: What are the key challenges of the telematics business case and model today?
Ralf: Automotive OEMs as well as the telematics ecosystem players (such as TSPs, Tier1s, wireless carriers, Content Providers) as a whole are all struggling with the telematics value proposition and even more with the monetization of it. I will discuss a business model framework in more detail at the event that highlights the interrelations between creating value, capturing value and delivering that value within a telematics business model.
In general, I believe Automotive OEMs still leave many opportunities on the table in regards to telematics and still don’t execute their telematics strategy well enough to maximize the value of it.
One reason is the complexity and organizational structure of the OEM itself. Telematics can bring value to many areas within the OEM incl. engineering, manufacturing, quality, sales and marketing, customer service, and finance as well as dealers and external partners. To be more successful requires the elevation of telematics to a more visible level within the overall corporate hierarchy and structure. I believe that telematics is less of a business case issue than an organizational design challenge.
Aligning the various stakeholder interests within an OEM has been challenging due to the conflicts among them. The result is that a telematics business case often gets “watered down” since it has to compete against much stronger “businesses and stakeholders” with their own P&L objectives.
A true telematics business case touches many areas within an OEM generating “micro” business cases in each so the potential value lives in the aggregate of these micro business cases.
So, as long as the impact of telematics in regards to increasing vehicle sales, improving the customer experience, improving the quality of the vehicle, reducing warranty expenses, increasing parts and services sales, or streamlining the CRM activities or dealer workshop services is not included and quantified in the business case, we will have only a fragmented and weak business case for telematics.
Telematics only more recently began moving up within the car OEMs strategic initiatives on a global scale and is getting more visibility at the C-‐level.
NAVIBIZ: What about the automotive app store as a business model?
Ralf: In recent years the industry faces additional challenges and disruptions from the Smartphone with an abundance of apps that are competing with traditional telematics services while providing a rich and seamless experience.
Automotive OEMs are feverishly working on smartphone integration solutions as well as the integration of native apps into vehicles. Many automotive OEMs such as BMW, GM, and Ford among others as well as telematics service providers are offering software development kits (SDKs) with vehicle specific APIs to attract third party developers to develop attractive apps onto car platforms.
However, the problem is there are not that many apps that are vehicle-‐centric and make best use of car-‐specific APIs. Many OEMs unfortunately focus, therefore, on popular consumer apps and somewhat reinvent the wheel by re-‐developing those apps into automotive-‐grade apps, which is not sustainable in the long run due to the fast product lifecycle as well as the associated costs. And again, monetization of those apps is difficult as well.
The biggest problem, however, is for OEMs to attract 3rd party app developers in the first place to either adapt consumer apps to integrate car APIs or develop car-‐specific native apps. Developers are often reluctant to work in this space because they find the car development environment to be highly fragmented and are turned off by low volume platforms with much stricter guidelines on safety and HMI and other disadvantages such as longer time to market, longer life cycle, lower volume, longer and more complicated approval cycles and should I mention the monetization problem again.
Vehicle-‐centric apps that leverage car-‐specific APIs will therefore be few, and we will not see 100s of thousands of automotive-‐relevant apps, not even 100s since many apps have no relevancy in cars or are niche apps only. This “controlled open platform” is not attractive for many but a few developers.
NAVIBIZ: Which is the successful telematics business model going forward?
Ralf: I think the consumer subscription model in its current form is not able to survive much longer since OEMs are in a hardware-‐centric business model (selling cars) and not a service-‐centric model (selling telematics content and services). The TSP partners unfortunately cannot scale it enough to keep it profitable. I think for the subscription model to survive one has to look at wireless carriers for bundling opportunities.
I also think the automotive app store concept will not bring a solution to solve the consumer monetization problem as described above.
I believe the future of Telematics lays in the value it can bring to the various businesses within an OEM and external stakeholders incl. insurance companies, government, dealers among others and the customer relationship management (CRM) and vehicle relationship management (VRM) opportunities it creates.
NAVIBIZ: This sounds very exciting indeed. Thank you. We look forward to the event and learning more about the business model challenges at the Inner Mongolia Event from September 13th – 16th 2012.