Mazda North American Operations has launched a new Web site that focuses on providing an improved customer experience.

MazdaUSA.com aims to align with Mazda’s move to the “near-premium landscape” and better engage with customers throughout the car-buying and -owning process. It was developed and designed by Mazda’s creative partner, WPP’s Garage Team Mazda, along with global digital agency Mirum.

Mazda is focusing on creating a unified look for the entire brand in order to engaging their customers in a consistent way across all interfaces. The newly designed Web site is another important step in the evolution of the Mazda brand, says Eric Watson, director of marketing operations for Mazda North American Operations.

“The Web site redesign came about in order to transition the existing site from an old platform that was built with a legacy system with no enterprise CMS, to a platform that included a larger focus from a business perspective and allowed us to tell our brand story,” Watson tells Marketing Daily. 

The company has been working with concepts, development and customer testing for the past 18 months, he says.

“We developed the new site to combat against the existing hard-coded system that took a significant amount of development work and testing every time we made a change, which made it difficult to quickly turn-around changes to the site,” Watson says.

The new site also integrates customer research and industry benchmark studies to deliver an intuitive user-friendly Web site. 

“While looking at existing user traffic to our old site we noticed that over 60% of our traffic came from mobile devices, so the redesign of the Web site focuses on our mobile users first,” Watson says “As a result, the interface of the site is fully responsive to adjust to any size device, providing excellent display, motion and user experience. We also built the Web site on a Mazda global platform, providing benefits of collaboration, utilizing similar features, and faster to market options as Mazda Corporate develops one format for all regions.”

The new site aims to limit the steps it takes for customers to engage in the shopping process — from building a vehicle, searching inventory or accessing a dealership Web site, he says. Current owners also benefit from the redesign, with an easily-accessible owners section that features helpful reference materials on the brand and the vehicles they own.

 “The design, look and feel of our Web site was created in collaboration with our vehicle designers to best express the vision of our new vehicle design and full global visual identity.” Watson says. “The introduction of the redesigned Web site is the first step toward customer digital engagement and provides a platform that is flexible to grow with our vision of delivering a great customer experience.”