The old adage ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ attributed to Ford’s return to racing in the US in the early 1950s* has been given a new twist by Hyundai. The company doesn’t want to be the world’s biggest car brand, but it does want to be the most loved.
The company is refreshingly honest in admitting that its brand value – or at least the way consumers, especially in Europe, see it – is nowhere near where it could be given the quality of its latest generation of products.
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We often hear car executives talk about wanting brands to be admired, respected, valued. They frequently make reference to the likes of Apple or Coca-Cola when trying to explain brand positioning.
But loved? I thought I had misheard Tak Uk Im, Hyundai Motor’s chief operating officer, when he said those words at the opening of the company’s new motorsport facility just outside Frankfurt.
But, no. There they were on the screen behind him.
Hyundai has been spending a lot of money trying to be loved – it has sponsored global football since 1999 through deals with UEFA and FIFA and that can’t be cheap. Nor does building a two-car rally team backed by a staff of 100 come cheap.
Next year, with the soccer world cup in Brazil and the world rally championship, the company will get unprecedented exposure.
But will that make people love them? On the sales front Hyundai has been doing well, anyway. Global sales have risen from 2.8m in 2008 to a target of 4.7m this year so they are pretty big whether they are loved or not.
Hyundai is taking another motorsport adage to heart. Racing improves the breed. The commitment to the world rally championship is also a “commitment to improving the performance of all our cars. Our next generation cars will be better because of lessons learnt at WRC, especially lessons of durability and reliability,” said Im.
That surely means getting emotion and passion into cars, something that Toyota has rediscovered with the GT 86.
For love, read passion.
That probably is the lesson that not just Hyundai needs to learn but quite a few others all of whom make excellent cars that people just don’t love because there is no soul to them.
*Ford notes on its website that it returned to racing with an official factory-sponsored effort in 1952. This was the team of Lincolns in the Carrera Panamericana, the famous Mexican road race. With its success, the Lincoln programme established the structure and climate for subsequent Ford racing participation. It also caught the attention of marketers because, when the Lincolns won, Lincoln-Mercury dealers around the country reported noticeable increases in showroom traffic.
