Nine brands. Two countries. Four years. One team.

The challenge

Running nine marketing departments out of one

• Nine brands that must not blurRugged trucks, luxury sedans and tech-forward SUVs, all under one group, each with something different to say and a different person to say it to.
• Nine rulebooks, and none of them bendsEvery franchise arrives with its own global corporate identity rules. Compliance is not negotiable, and it still has to perform.
• New brands without eating the old onesLaunching a disruptive brand in the same showroom group as an established one, without taking its market share to do it.

The brands

Nine names, one engine room

Each one runs under its own identity, its own audience and its own budget line.

• FAWLogo to follow
• OmodaLogo to follow
• JaecooLogo to follow
• GWMLogo to follow
• MitsubishiLogo to follow
• HavalLogo to follow
• CheryLogo to follow
• MercedesLogo to follow
• ShacmanLogo to follow

Two countries

The same engine, run across a border

• South AfricaThe main group of branches, and where the nine-brand framework was built and proved.
• EswatiniThe same framework, run in a second country with its own market, its own buyers and its own conditions.

A framework that only works in one market is not a framework. It is a habit that happens to be working.

How it works

A framework, not nine separate efforts

Each brand gets its own voice, not its own agency. Organic social moved from posting product photographs to telling a story that fits the person who buys that particular badge. A Mercedes buyer and a Shacman buyer are not the same person and are not spoken to as though they are.

Paid spend goes to intent, not to applause. Reach and impressions are easy to buy in the motor trade. The money follows the searches that end in a test drive.

The corporate identity rules are treated as a starting point. An internal check runs every piece against the franchise’s global specification before it goes out — not to slow the work down, but so nobody has to redo it.

Four years of lead quality, read down-funnel. Not which advert got clicks, but which branch and which model the clicks turned into. Budget and creative move toward whichever branch is converting, continuously.

Four years in

What the partnership actually amounts to

Corporate compliance did not have to come at the expense of performance. Four years of multi-franchise management is the proof of that, and it is a longer test than most agencies ever get.