Mercedes-Benz LINE

The LINE account was the main way the brand reached people in Thailand, and it treated all of them identically. Someone who had owned three cars and someone who followed the account for the photography received the same broadcast.

The two want different things. An owner wants their service appointment and the things that come with ownership. Someone who isn't one yet wants the showroom and the test drive. Sending both to both is how you become the account people mute.

Registration happens in LINE. No app to install, no account to create, no password — you tap the menu, fill in a few fields, and you're done. It runs in Thai and English, and Thai nationals enter their name in Thai, because that's the version that matches the records.

The only sensitive thing it asks for is the last four digits of a national ID, or a passport number for foreigners. Four digits alongside a name is enough to find a match without asking anyone to hand over a full ID number to a chat app.

On submit, the details are checked against the customer records and the person is recognised as an owner or as a follower. What the menu shows them and what they get sent follows from that.

The customer data lives in Salesforce, and the brand's marketing runs from it. The interesting engineering was in joining a LINE front end to that back end cleanly — the form is a LINE experience, but everything it writes lands where the marketing team already works.

We could have proposed our own database and a nicer API. It would have been a better system and the wrong recommendation: a second copy of customer data that has to be kept in step with the first is a permanent tax on the client, paid long after we've gone.