Summary
Honda has been the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer since 1959, and the world’s largest manufacturer of internal combustion engines. Honda became the second-largest Japanese automobile manufacturer in 2001 and is the eighth largest automobile manufacturer globally. Honda has a driven PR team, working hard to drive reputation, awareness and engagement for the business. Since CARMA started working with Honda to create a powerful European evaluation programme, the European and regional PR teams are now able to leverage media insights. In 2023, Honda used CARMA’s strategic advice to optimise the communication of their latest product and corporate announcements in Europe.

Objective/Brief
CARMA started working with the EU comms teams in 2020 throughout the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. Each team used to operate in silo. In 2021, Honda moved away from AVEs and for the first time, elaborated an IEF in collaboration with CARMA, established new benchmarks for success and implemented a holistic measurement programme to feed regional insights into European strategies.
In 2022, CARMA research identified the need to leverage product coverage for strengthened communication around corporate strategy in Europe and Honda’s endeavour to win the carbon neutral race. In 2023, Honda used this research to make a series of product and corporate announcements to reinvigorate their pledge to sustainable mobility and strengthen their commitment to the European market.

The brand identified the need to:
Reputation:

• Support Honda’s Electric Vision
• Target younger demographics
• Strengthen brand positioning around zero-emission technology and environmental sustainability

Awareness:

• Raise visibility around the arrival of three new SUVs and the brand’s first European electric moped
• Communicate Honda’s new energy services products to be offered to European consumers

Engagement:

• Achieve volume and profit targets
• Increase goal completions on its website
• Increase search interest
• Drive social media engagement

Strategy
CARMA identified the need to engage senior stakeholders from the European head office and designed a series of workshops. The focus was on developing collective agreement on objectives and desired outcomes. The team developed an IEF, working collaboratively to create an agreement on how best to demonstrate impact on objectives and create insights that could inform benchmarking and planning at a European and regional level.

CARMA established credible targets for the branches in order to define success. The team leveraged historical data from the previous HR-V and Civic launches to establish a benchmark. These results were subsequently weighted by Honda’s regional share of sales to align them with commercial objectives.

CARMA liaised with all 5 branches to understand specific regional needs whilst coordinating with the European office to streamline global evaluation efforts.

Meanwhile, the European office required a single metric to report back to Japan. To fulfil this need, the team unpacked the metrics of success that were aligned to regional PR objectives and created a custom score based on best practice and two frameworks.

To advance measurement maturity, CARMA recommended integrating outtake metrics such as social media data and outcome metrics such as webtraffic, Google trends and goal conversions to enhance reporting.

The launch of three new SUVs (e:Ny1, ZR-V and CR-V), Honda’s first European electric bike and the release of corporate announcements in May 2023 were identified as a perfect opportunity to optimise measurement, demonstrate best practice on a real-life campaign and gain buy-in from the European branches.

Execution/Implementation

1. CARMA created an IEF collaboratively with the European teams to guide evaluation efforts at all levels. This enabled the teams to understand how PR activities and different teams defined success and where differentiation was needed.
2. Using the framework, rooted in best practice, CARMA developed a composite PR Impact metric, identifying the need for two different variations for Honda’s automotive and motorcycle divisions.
3. CARMA delivered strategic longer-term insights to the European team and granular, tactical and detailed recommendations at a regional level.
4. CARMA and Honda continuously train the branches on latest technological advancements and best practice within the industry. The team covered the benefits of PR Impact over vanity metrics, the different uses of big data and smart data, the usefulness of integrating external datasets to the measurement.
5. Honda’s measurement programme includes not only basic measurement and evaluation but also bespoke humanly-curated executive briefings, scorecards and in-depth monthly insights dashboards and special insights reports.
6. Further building its insights awareness, Honda commissioned CARMA with reports around:
a. Issue identification (providing regular guidance on key issues affecting relevant industries or brands across automotive, environmental, and geopolitical issues);
b. Activitism (identifying relevant areas or issues gaining traction with environmental groups or activists, in addition to analysing pertinent brand sentiment);
c. Brand reputation (building on the data we have across media and social to more clearly identify relevant brand issues or commentary on Honda and its products).
7. CARMA provided enriched findings at a regional and European level looking at:
a. Automated and humanly-coded data;
b. Honda and competitors/industry data;
c. Honda current and past performance data;
d. Quantitative and qualitative metrics;
e. Benchmarking with industry, competitor, previous performance and Honda’s own commercial data;
f. Media data correlated with search traffic, social media, web traffic and goal completion data.

Effectiveness of Assignment
The EU comms team continues to have more and more strategic conversations with the branches as a result of more in-depth and relevant analysis. The narrative no longer solely focuses on “how much” but also “how good” and “what now”. At a high level, the qualitative analysis highlights strengths and weaknesses across markets, allowing management to focus on what matters.
For the branches, reporting is no longer a box ticking exercise – reports look at quality, not quantity. Branches have a better understanding of the importance of engaging with top-target media and delivering the right messages.
The team has moved from outputs to outcomes, using external datasets for further evidence of comms successes. The measurement is routinely used to inform planning meetings and regional targets.
The launch of three new SUVs and Honda’s first electric powered two-wheeler demonstrated Honda’s corporate commitment towards its climate strategy and global sustainability targets. This event in May 2023 came at the perfect time to reiterate the results of the measurement journey CARMA and Honda had been on.

In terms of direct media outputs:

• The announcements generated 12.3m in reach, the favourability rate was exceptionally positive;
• 71% of the coverage landed in top-targeted media;
• 96% of the coverage delivered 2 or more brand messages, with an average of 4 messages per article;
• 38% of articles featured Honda’s corporate strategy;
• Social media posts increased by 707% and engagement by 3702%

The team subsequently investigated the impact on target audience behaviour:

• 79% of social media posts featured a brand message and 31% was positive towards the brand;
• 114% increase in search interest across all EU G5
• 128,600% increase in e:Ny1, ZR-V and CR-V model page views on the day of the launch;
• Goal completion following the launch was 74% higher on the day of the announcement.

The analysis demonstrated that the communication of Honda’s Carbon Neutral corporate strategy and electrification goals with the launch of their new products contributed to a spike in audience interest, measured as an increase in web traffic to the launch page, a finding fed into future launches.

Reflecting on the programme, Nik Pearson, Head of Corporate Communications Automobile & Sustainability, said:
“CARMA provides curated metrics that not only allows us to tangibly demonstrate value internally on a pan-European level, but also helps shape the activity being conducted at a market level to both generate awareness of our products and drive consumer action.”