aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, May 25, 2007

Hyundai’s image problem

Hyundai sent a mailing today encouraging me to save a tree. I can switch to email mailings from the car-maker but not opt out. So we kill a couple more trees and they blame me. My take is that the cost of the mailings is the only disincentive I can send!

I bought my second Hyundai last year. I’d have rather bought a Camry, but $5,000 and half the warranty convinced me to stick with Hyundai. Their goal must be not just to keep me as a customer but to make me choose them again next time based on something other than price. If anyone can do it, this guy can:

As senior vice-president for global marketing at Nissan in Tokyo and vice-president for marketing at Nissan’s North American operation before that, [Steve Wilhite] was used to looking at Hyundai as a competitor. He’d seen its quality improve “to scary levels,” he says--and sales stall. It was clear that the company needed a new “big idea” to redefine its brand and move it away from an association with cheap, tin-pot vehicles. Wilhite had reinvigorated brands before, earning marketing-guru status at Volkswagen in the 1990s when he led the German carmaker’s comeback, largely through clever advertising. Then he’d gone on to become Apple Computer Inc.’s top marketer. That Hyundai chose Wilhite to run its entire U.S. operation says volumes about how critical a strong, new brand identity is to Hyundai’s future.

Apple & VW; those are great associations. But the job is a tough one:

Wilhite is focused on repositioning Hyundai as an overachieving, underappreciated brand that smart people are discovering. While briefing the ad agencies bidding for the new Hyundai campaign, he evoked the “Drivers Wanted” ad campaign that Arnold Worldwide created for Volkswagen in the mid-1990s, as well as the classic VW ads from the 1960s, that “made consumers look at a brand through a different lens.” Says Scott Goodson, CEO of ad agency Strawberry Frog: “Even when you show a consumer that quality is higher than Toyota, they don’t believe you.” [...]

In the end, Wilhite and a committee of managers and dealers opted for San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein + Partners. Goodby helped to define Hyundai’s problem using research involving 200 people who sized up the new Veracruz crossover. When a group was shown the vehicle without any identifying logos on it, 71% said they’d buy it. Once the Hyundai logo went on, however, that dropped to 52%. In the same research, a Toyota logo lifts intent-to-purchase by more than 20%.

Goodby’s campaign, due out by June, is expected to blanket TV, the Internet, and newspapers with data about safety ratings, quality, and value pricing using a tone that agency CEO Jeff Goodby describes as one of “disarming honesty.” The idea is to create an environment, he says, where neighbors and co-workers of Hyundai buyers completely understand why they bought a Hyundai. “Hyundai,” he notes, “has no social currency today.”

I hope they succeed. A freind’s Mercedes broke down, again, in the parking lot at lunch the other day (actually, it switched to “limp mode” so that it could hobble home) and still I feel defensive the logo on my grill. But I love the car. Highest safety rating, great gas mileage as prices soar, bumper to bumper warranty and roadside service.