From hawker centres in shorts to the Audi boardroom

ONE of the most powerful women in the global car industry dropped by Singapore with good news for car dealers last week: the need for huge, expensive showrooms is over. The bad news? She expects dealers to crack their heads to figure out how to reinvent their premises altogether.

“We’re always challenging our dealer partners and saying, ‘Imagine you and your friend or your family have a Saturday afternoon and you have some free time. Would you go into your dealership and spend time?’” said Hildegard Wortmann, the board member in charge of sales and marketing at Audi.

Wortmann, who is also a Member of the Extended Executive Committee of the much larger Volkswagen Group, where she is responsible for group-level sales, spoke to The Business Times at a private dinner with Audi customers on Nov 19.

If she looked glad for the chance to mingle with the brand’s local fans, it might be because she lived in Singapore for a spell. She speaks fondly of the times she went to hawker centres, dressed in shorts. “I’m really happy to be back. It feels a bit like coming home,” she said.

Wortmann moved here in January 2018 to run sales for BMW Group’s Asia-Pacific region, its second largest sales territory after Europe, but jumped ship to Audi to become the first ever female on its board a year later.

Meeting her meant that apart from getting the chance to hobnob with one of only seven Audi board members, customers also got to kick the tyres of the futuristic Urbansphere, a grandiose lounge on wheels.

Electric and autonomous (its steering wheel folds out of sight when the car is in self-driving mode), the Urbansphere is one of three concept cars that foretell how Audi wants to reboot itself for the post-combustion era.

Its airy cabin and open layout show how designers will soon be doing their work inside-out since electric cars’ components leave more room for interiors. “Normally we do these beautiful exterior designs and then at a very late stage we start doing the interior. I think this is changing,” Wortmann said.

That’s not the only thing changing. Wortmann has the tricky job of figuring out how to adapt Audi’s DNA to an era where customer tastes and habits are evolving quickly enough to make heads spin.

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Take the shift to electric cars. “Every year we do the planning for the next five to 10 years and we realise that the tipping point comes earlier and earlier. So yes, I think it’s moving faster than probably any of us expected,” Wortmann said.

Changing retail habits have also posed a vexing question to the industry: Will people want to buy cars online or still go to showrooms? The answer, according to Wortmann, is yes. “For example now in Singapore, people expect different services (but are) more convenience-driven, so I think definitely the way we’re gonna sell cars will be a mixture of physical and digital,” she said. She uses the term “phygital” to describe the idea.

It’s a word that might bring comfort to Audi dealers everywhere. Car manufacturers are flirting with a direct-to-customer retail model that bypasses middlemen altogether, but Wortmann sees a role for dealers even in Singapore, where she feels people live online, as opposed to merely going online.

“A car is still something very emotional, something very expensive, something very special to people, so not everybody wants to do the whole journey just online: done, just get the car delivered, that’s it,” she said, in her clipped, precise speech. Instead, dealerships have to evolve from being point-of-sales to what she calls “point-of-experience”.

That means creating spaces for people to understand what it means to choose an Audi, and putting them in the right locations. She named Audi’s “House of Progress” as an example of this idea in action. It’s an immersive pop-up that travels to major cities, showcasing Audi’s concept cars and electric vehicles to prompt conversations about what mobility should look like after combustion is history — an event Audi has decided should happen in 2032, the year it expects to build its last combustion engine.

“I don’t think you need these mega showrooms with hundreds of cars in there, because this variety of presentation you can do with a virtual world,” Wortmann explains. “But you need to be in the city centres, you need to be in the hotspots, you need to be there where customers enjoy strolling around, you know?”

Wortmann wants Audi spaces in peoples’ faces because she sees the need for brands in general to flaunt their attitude. “If you look at the young generation, they don’t just buy a product because it’s a product. They buy the brand, the attitude behind the brand,” she says. “They want to see what this brand stands for. What is the contribution of this brand to society?”

The point-of-experience idea is something Singaporeans are already familiar with, but not yet with cars. Just as Jewel at Changi gives people a reason to head to the airport even if they’re staying put in the country, car companies have to entice crowds who aren’t particularly interested in cars.

That might seem like a world apart from lining up the latest, shiniest Audi models in a showroom and waiting for people to come test drive them, but Wortmann is more excited than daunted by the change, and by change itself.

“It is the most exciting time to be here because everything is changing,” she said, before pointing out that Audi still makes cars but has suddenly also become a software company, a battery company, an energy company and a charging operator. “What did I know about all that?”

If Audi’s designers have started to do things from the inside out, at least its first female board member is comfortable with turning her own world upside down.