Forbes Insights: Luxury Automotive Market Outlook

White papers and custom publishing content are usually so dry that they compel us to stop reading. That’s why my goal for massive projects such as this one, which I undertook for Forbes’ custom publishing and research division, was to apply key feature-writing techniques that make the copy digestible and, dare I say, compelling with a good flow.

Some of these techniques included avoiding the use of technical jargon and infusing personal anecdotes from key sources to humanize and counterbalance the number crunching. But the true foundation for success lay in first pulling out the main talking points from the data, a rigorous and time-intensive process in and of itself.

The white paper displayed above used data and analytics from research firm BIGinsight to devise a proprietary Luxury Car Buzz Index that ranked the leading luxury automotive brands using a composite score that measured customer satisfaction and loyalty, car owners’ propensity to recommend their brand to others, and the effectiveness of marketing efforts in both traditional and digital media, as well as the impact of digital word-of-mouth through social media and blogs.

These months-long projects not only required assimilating lots of data into a cohesive narrative, but also required dozens of interviews with thought leaders, including heads of marketing and CEOs at global automakers.