In an industry traditionally defined by in-person experiences, how can a virtual product tour reshape the customer journey and redefine the way brands like Mack Trucks engage with their audience?
This episode is brought to you by The Office of Experience, a design-driven, digital-first, vertically integrated and collaborative agency that believes in the power of ideas and the strength of people.
We’re excited to have two guests with us today to discuss the innovative Mack Truck Live Tour: David Galbraith, Vice President of Global Brand and Marketing for Mack Trucks, and Lisa Ferriter, Managing Director and Head of Client Strategy at The Office of Experience. Together, they’ve collaborated to create a groundbreaking virtual product tour that is setting a new standard in the trucking industry.
About David Galbraith
David arrived at Mack Trucks from Volkswagen of America, where he served as Senior Director of Experience and Brand Partnership Marketing. For over 8 years he led a variety of digital and experiential programs. Prior to Volkswagen, David spent almost 20 yrs in the technology sector, serving in a variety of roles in communications, strategy and brand management roles at both Dell and IBM.
David earned his bachelor’s degree in information systems and management from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and his MBA in international marketing from American University in Washington, D.C.
About Lisa Ferriter
Lisa Ferriter is Managing Director and oversees the Client Strategy practice at the Office of Experience (OX). Lisa leads with a passion for collaboration, strategic planning, and delivering measurable business impact.
An enthusiastic and experienced client partner, team lead, and senior marketing professional, Lisa specializes in team growth and development, client success, demand generation, technology, digital and brand strategy for B2B businesses. She thrives on creating and executing data-driven strategies that align with business objectives, track to key performance indicators, and maximize ROI.
With a career spanning multiple industries, Lisa has partnered with clients across consumer electronics, FinTech, financial services, SaaS, food service, manufacturing, transportation/automotive, professional services, hospitality, healthcare and real estate. Her ability to navigate complex challenges and drive growth has made her a trusted advisor and leader in the field. Whether working with startups or established enterprises, Lisa is committed to fostering strong partnerships and leading high-performing teams to achieve sustainable success.
Resources
The Office of Experience: https://www.officeofexperience.com
Mack Trucks Live Tour: https://www.macktrucks.com/live-tour/
Mack Trucks:
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited.
Greg Kihlstrom:
In an industry traditionally defined by in-person experiences, how can a virtual product tour reshape the customer journey and redefine the way brands like Mack Trucks engage with their audience? This episode is brought to you by the Office of Experience, a design-driven, digital-first, vertically integrated, and collaborative agency that believes in the power of ideas and the strength of people. We’re excited to have two guests today with us to discuss the innovative Mack Truck Live Tour, David Galbraith, Vice President of Global Brand and Marketing for Mack Trucks, and Lisa Ferriter, Managing Director and Head of Client Strategy at the Office of Experience. Together, they’ve collaborated to create a groundbreaking virtual product tour that’s setting a new standard in the trucking industry. Welcome to the show, David and Lisa.
David Galbraith: Thank you.
Greg Kihlstrom: Thanks for having us. Yeah, looking forward to talking about this. Before we dive in and learn a little bit more about this, why don’t each of you start by sharing just a little bit about your background and role in bringing this to life?
Lisa Ferriter: Thanks, Greg. I am Lisa Ferriter. I’m the managing director at OX and I oversee our client strategy team. So that is our team of client business partners. And I’ve been a partner to David and the team at Mack Trucks working closely with them for over five years. My role in helping to bring the MacLive tour to market, you know, goes back to the year 2020, which was a formative year for Mac in terms of needing to think about and re-examine the customer experience. As you can imagine, that was a formative year for many businesses. And it was a time to kind of look and think about the way that customers engage with the product, needing to do that in a more virtually enabled sales experience versus a traditional, you know, in-person physical experience. And so we began our conversations with Mac around that time and looking at their journey to bring this idea to them. And it really was kind of a moonshot at the time. And I’ll turn it over to David.
David Galbraith: Yeah, I’ve been part of Mac now for going on four years. And prior to that, I was with VW. And prior to that, it was with Dell. And one of the things that brings us here really was a desire to explore new ways to engage with our customer base. I give credit where credit’s due. Lisa and the OX team, they came up and said, hey, what about XYZ? And if nothing, COVID taught us that one, there’s a lot of unique ways to engage with customers. And then after COVID, there was still a strong desire to do stuff in person. but that original learnings kept going. People still were very fine with virtual engagements. And now we’re exploring that and we can talk more about that.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. So let’s, let’s dive right in then. And, you know, so I know we’ve, we’ve touched on it briefly, but let’s, let’s talk a little bit more about, you know, what the Mack Truck Live Tour is all about. Can you describe it for us?
David Galbraith: Yeah, so it’s, you know, this is one of those things, Greg, that’s just dead over the plate. You know, the idea was, hey, what if we put a truck in a studio, we found a well-spoken ambassador, and we went out to some of our customers and said, hey, you know, would you like to learn about this new truck in this way? And it took us a little while to get there. I think Lisa mentioned, I think we reviewed the idea in 21. And I don’t think we started really getting serious about it until late 22. And we’ve implemented it in where it’s a curated tour with an ambassador. It’s not a sales call. It’s not meant to be a sales call. It’s meant to simply those people that have not experienced you know, the Mac Anthem or the Mac Granite, or even the Mac brand in general, have an opportunity to kind of figure out what’s going on with this truck. And what we get out of it is we control the environment, we have the trucks, and we make it available. The benefit to the customer, I think, in some ways, and Lisa, jump in here if I’m getting ahead of myself, but You know, like any outlet through COVID in that period of time, we didn’t always have trucks on the ground. We were selling everything we could. And so we were having customers and dealers saying, well, I’d like to show you a truck, but I can’t. I don’t have one on the lot or I don’t have that specific trim or whatever it was. No fault of their own. I love my dealer partners. So part of this was, well, what if we gave them an alternative that was a low pressure, very brief, 30 minutes to 45 minutes engagement, learn about the truck, learn if it’s more interesting to them or not. And then if they want to get pushed to a dealer, you know, we can serve that up. But they have full right of refusal on that part as well. It works so well for us, especially in conjunction with our configurator. So the two support each other. You know, you can go configure a truck and then you can go over here and explore it and learn more about it.
Lisa Ferriter: The other consideration is the pre-purchase and consideration phase for this market can last anywhere from three months to a year. And that is coming with lots of visits to the dealership, lots of conversations to make sure that you’re lining up the spec that is most important to you, you know, and for the biggest customers, they might be doing that, you know, to buy 200 trucks a year. And so if you think about it that way, that’s a customer who is always buying. And this is a way for that customer to really engage with the product in a way that can potentially shorten the buying cycle, can allow them to get the information that they need in a direct way, talking to a product expert, as David said, in a very non sales-driven way. It’s really just getting to the brass tacks of the product and the questions that they have to help shorten up or make that process more efficient for the customer. So I think that’s another thing worthy of calling out that it really has a direct benefit to the way that these customers experience the product and look to buy the product.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And let’s, let’s talk a little bit more about that, that end user experience. I mean, you know, to your point, I think COVID changed the way that a lot of people thought about whether it’s the necessity of, of going in person or, or just, you know, rethought a little bit about that as well as, To your other point about the sales cycle, you’re buying 200 trucks. That’s not something you do. You don’t do that on a whim, right? So these are considered purchases. What does that end user experience look like? And where does the Mack Truck Live Tour fit in that experience?
David Galbraith: Yeah, the simplest way to explain it is we have it on our website and we have promoted it a little bit, primarily socially. You click over to it and it’s simply an explainer, some FAQs, and then you get to schedule it and then select a truck that you’re interested in. We typically don’t allow selections within 24 hours. For example, I think we can support anywhere from between four and six reviews a day, but we’ve got to shuffle the trucks and that’s why there’s the variance. You’ve got to pull one truck in, pull another truck out. The facility isn’t big enough to have all our trucks laid out like a football field. And then, you know, it’s ideally the customers or the audience comes with questions. We have a very engaging ambassador and they’re happy to just kind of start into a dialogue and walk around the truck and bring up the most pertinent features. But when we’ve gotten engagement and interaction and he can’t see their faces, mind you, all he hears is the voice, the questions that they ask. They can see him and you can have as many people as you want on the call. But when he gets engagement, that’s when it really shines, because then he can go into some details about the truck or whatever their specific concern is, or if they have additional questions. Those occur frequently. The survey responses that we got back, outrageously good, outrageously good. And where it fits in our overall, I think it drives, it helps us drive not more than awareness, but right to the consideration and excellent opinion level. Because on the one hand, it’s somewhat innovative. It’s very easy for the customer, such like a easy button to get there. On the other hand, they learn quite a bit about Mack Trucks, whether they’re meaning to or not. If they’re there to kick the tires, that’s great. And if they’re more serious, that’s great too.
Greg Kihlstrom: And Lisa, from the agency perspective, you know, how did you approach creating this and, you know, doing something like this, which, you know, first of its kind, I assume, for a company like Mack Trucks?
Lisa Ferriter: Yeah, as David can attest, you know, he spoke about kind of the year in between when this idea first came to the forefront to when it actually became a reality. And that year was filled with conversations between he and I of, you know, how do we make sure that we are making the risk on this project worth the investment? And how do we make sure that, you know, we can support this with a business case that everybody is going to really understand? But this is so important for Mac in that it really puts them first to market in the trucking industry with a concept that is so focused on the direct end customer. You know, this is a dealer sales business. And so this is very unique for them to have a direct dialogue, an open conversation with the end customer without the sales pressure. I would say, you know, how we did this, we focused on a minimum viable products. We focused on kind of defining what needed to happen in the first iteration. And as he mentioned, you know, those were considerations like, should this be two-way video or one-way video? What is going to be most comfortable for the customer on the other end of the line? How does somebody submit questions and change the conversation midstream if they want to do that? You know, what does it look like for Mac from a lead generation standpoint? Because we’ve said there’s no sales pressure here. So how do we maintain that, but also use this as a great source of customer data in terms of what our customers are interested in and what questions they’re asking that can help to inform everything else we’re doing from a marketing perspective. The Mac team took on the heavy lifting in the logistics of this, pun intended, in setting up the studio space and identifying the Mac product expert, getting him a very solid script that he can start from and kind of then go with each customer as they engage. But yeah, I would say, you know, an MVP was the most important thing for us in just focusing on this thing can grow over time, but to get it to market, you know, let’s kind of choose our battles with the feature set so that we can start to proof it out and we can make changes from there.
Greg Kihlstrom: And so, uh, David, there’s broader, there’s like macro macro trends here in, you know, in the B2B space in particular consumer self-education, you know, there’s a lot of trends there and virtualization of, of experiences and everything. Certainly this plays into some of those things that more and more B2B customers are wanting. How do you see this as not only fitting in with some of those growing trends, but also fitting the brand’s broader strategy?
David Galbraith: I think you put the nail on the head there. I think it does fit in with some of those broader trends. Not only are we witnessing a resurgence in people just wanting experiences, but the ability to go trial different things is kind of a culmination of this desire for experience and the right technology at the right time really kind of enabled this. I don’t think we would have done something like this without the proof point that COVID, that Teams and Zoom and all these elements can really work for people and really kind of demonstrate stuff. So that’s right in line. As it relates to the brand, we’re celebrating our 125th year this year. Mac’s been around since 1900. And it’s one of those things where we have a DNA of innovation, but it’s been heavily engineering-oriented traditionally. And so we actually feel like this fits right into our DNA. It’s something innovative. I give a lot of credit to my management team. You know, they have trust, they trusted us to go out and swing at something. And I’m not going to say it’s a home run yet. I’d still say we’re, we’re working through it, but we feel good at the direction. And so for a Mac fit, it’s absolutely there as well, trying some new stuff and seeing what works.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And Lisa, what technology or and design elements were key to making something like this engaging, effective? And what did you see there?
Lisa Ferriter: Yeah, it’s a great question because I think where we started is not where we ended. We took a swing with a virtual meeting platform initially, but what we were experiencing was some latency in the delivery. And I think that, you know, as we talk about with an MVP, it was making it really challenging out of the gate. If we’re going to have a two-way conversation, that element of latency, I think, would have caused immediate user frustration. So we actually ended up ditching that entirely. And the Mac team has put this together through their instance of Microsoft Teams, essentially. So it is a virtual meeting. I think David spoke to that really well and saying that has enabled this to be successful because people know how to work that technology. they get into the experience and there’s an immediate familiarity in platforms like Zoom and platforms like Teams that gained obviously a lot of usage during the pandemic time when that was the only way that we were communicating. That’s really, I think, the thing to call out. Other than that, the landing page for the experience was actually built on Mac’s Adobe instance. And there’s a scheduling tool that is used, again, through their Adobe instance to actually schedule the tours and to look at the products that are going to be available at that time.
David Galbraith: Yeah, they worked pretty hard to look at the, like how many cameras can we support? How much staff do we actually need? And all that was worked through and massaged. And I think we landed on a really efficient way. We stationary cameras, we have Brian who handles the ambassadorial duties. And then we have Sam who’s at the switchboard and it’s kind of a two man magic team.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And let’s talk about measuring success. You know, what are the metrics? Maybe start with you, David, but what are metrics that both MAC as well as Office of Experience use to gauge success of this initiative?
David Galbraith: Yeah, I’d love to say is marking qualified leads and stuff like that. And those are important. but full transparency, I want people to recommend it. I want people to end their session and say, that was kind of cool, I think Joe or Sarah should attend the next one. So to me, and that’s what we surveyed for, it was like, hey, would you recommend? And I think it’s in the 90s. And so that’s ultimately what we want. And then as long as the quality is there, and then we can start scaling it a little bit more. Yeah, then we’ll worry about leads and then we’ll worry about, you know, how big can we actually get this? But for me, it’s the quality and the recommendation, I think.
Lisa Ferriter: Yeah, I would say for us, it’s about finding ways that this platform can continually evolve to be of business value to Mac in new ways. And, you know, we’ve already started to think and dream with the team at Mac of, You know, how could this space and this platform be used for a virtual event? You know, if we think about a product launch, is there something that we can do that actually enables us to do that differently than we have in the past? Because now we can pull a truck into the studio and we can essentially, you know, virtually put a driver behind the wheel in a way that we couldn’t in the past. You know, certainly things like VR have enabled that, but this really can do that in a group setting. you could put an entire dealership of people on a call and really kind of preview something to them that they haven’t seen or give them a behind the scenes tour. So I think just thinking about ways that we can continue to take what has been built here and scale it for Mac as they think about their business will be the real measure of success.
David Galbraith: I want to riff on that just for a second. She mentioned something and that’s the dealers, you know, we have fantastic partners in our dealers. And at first we were like, hey, you know, we want to make a special point. We’re not trying to pull customers away from you or anything like that. And it was actually the reverse. It was actually the reverse. What we found is once the dealers saw it, they started using it with their customers. It was that kind of adoption where now they use it for sometimes new hire training. They use it with customers if they’re, you know, two remote locations. So we felt that was an unintentional benefit or a little sub win there.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, that’s really powerful. Yeah. And because that’s a, that’s an important relationship, right? And, and yeah, I mean, that’s, I think that’s a good segue here is, you know, another thing that we’re talking about here is collaboration between a brand and, and their agency. And, you know, so certainly, you know, five-year relationship here between OX and, and Mack Trucks. David, from your perspective, you know, what, what are the characteristics that make a good partnership like you have with OX?
David Galbraith: Yeah. A lot of different things, Greg. So one of the things that they approach it as a steward of the brand on one hand, on the other hand, it’s in their name, experiences. And so they come at it from the perspective of what can we do to engender a better experience for the Mac brand and for Mac products. And I couldn’t help for a better partner in that way of thinking.
Greg Kihlstrom: Lisa, how about you? What insights did your team gain from working so closely with Mac Trucks as you have?
Lisa Ferriter: Yeah, I mean, this, there is no better project as an example of that question and what we see value in a partnership in general, but specifically with Mac and that’s the trust to take a risk. You know, this was, as David said, this was a big swing. This was something that hasn’t been done in the industry. There’s not another brand we can point to and say, see, they’re doing it successfully. We need, we need to have a lookalike. This really was net new and to have the trust and the partnership to make this real and to, you know, put together an MVP, I think that’s the real value here. The transparency, obviously, that comes along with that. There were moments of, you know, picking up the phone and saying, we’re not gonna be able to do that, or the platform isn’t working, we need another solution. So I think there are some difficult conversations there along the way, but the ability to have the trust and the candor is the most important thing.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I love it. Well, last question here for those brands, you know, listening out there that, you know, want to find ways to be more innovative, be more customer centric, what’s some advice that you would have for them in their in their approaches?
David Galbraith: Yeah, I’m a fairly big reader. I love some of the thinking that goes into Simon Sinek’s why and the jobs to be done methodology. And so I think listening to our customers and really kind of understanding what the problem needs are can lead usually to a solution. Maybe it’s not the most efficient first round, but to me it kind of boils down to really understanding what the customer need is and then trying to figure out what can fit.
Lisa Ferriter: I couldn’t agree more. I’m going to build on that, too, and say, you know, we always think about a customer journey. It is not a static set it and forget it asset. It is something that is living, breathing, evolving. And if if a brand doesn’t think about their customer journey in that way, they are never going to be innovative and they’re never going to get ahead of that customer expectation. So I think in order to stay innovative and in order to kind of continue to deliver what customers are looking for, it’s about making sure that you keep your eye on that journey. You find new pain points as they arise, new barriers as they come up, and you look for ways to alleviate those.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, love it. Very last question real quick here. I like to ask all my guests, what do you do to stay agile in your roles and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Lisa Ferriter: I am a backlogger. I keep a very active to-do list or backlog and I’m also a true believer in continuous improvement. You know, kind of doing an internal retro on things. How did that conversation go? How could we have handled that differently? How could we have presented something to an audience differently? So I think, you know, Agile is the name of the game. You have to be willing to continuously evolve
David Galbraith: Yeah. I typically, I love the meetings with my teams. I like sharing ideas and then letting them kind of run with it from there and see where it evolves to. I try not to over-direct. I really do. My team might argue otherwise sometimes. But to me, that’s where a lot of this comes to life. It’s through that combined collaboration. And not just with my team, but with OX as well.
