Feb. 3, 2006 - A Little Marketing Would Help
Sometimes a little marketing would help. To make my point, I give you the tale of two sport compacts. Both are icons that have gone through several generations, lost their ways a bit in recent years only to be reintroduced like twin Phoenixes in the sport compact sky. I’m speaking about the VW GTI and Honda Civic Si if you haven’t already figured that out.
Honda is doing well and there is a reason. They have learned from there past mistake of ignoring the modern tuner market, a market they almost single handedly created, and introduced the new Si brilliantly—so well has their approach worked that there is a three month waiting list at the dealer for the model here in the Detroit area.
Thanks to Honda’s foresight, the Civic was the car of the Specialty Equipment Marketing Association’s (SEMA) trade gathering this past November and tuned models were all over the show floor. Honda passed out Civics to many well known tuning shops around the country before it was released to the public, giving these shops precious time to develop performance bits and bling before the first customer took to the road and just in time for SEMA. A great positive buzz was created and the result is customers lined up at Honda dealers with cash in hand today.
Volkswagen took the stealth approach, either by design or giant bureaucratic corporation ineptitude (I suspect the latter). Sure they did show their wares at SEMA last year just as Honda did, but it was a shotgun blast across the entire range instead of a rifle shot at any one model. To make matters worse, as of this writing there is still no information about the GTI at VW’s North American website; nor do the dealers have any literature. But they have cars, more cars than customers apparently because the dealer I visited today had several color and option combinations to choose from. How can a car company launch such an important car with so little marketing effort? Sure the GTI is not a big money maker for the company, but it does excite enthusiasts who have been known to recommend cars, and car companies, to people with a little less gasoline in their veins.
The new GTI is a great car, possibly even better than the new Civic Si, yet little things like information on the website, brochures at the dealer, and trained salespeople are keeping people from noticing it. This is not to say that VW doesn’t have a big marketing campaign up its sleeve—it might—but if cars are already at the dealer one would hope that some effort would have already been put forth.
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