Starter for 10 – what is the average age of the B-segment buyer here in the UK?
The rather surprising answer, according to people at the factory-owned Mazda Motors UK sales and marketing unit, is 55, or 53 in the case of the automaker’s own 2 (officially it’s the Mazda2 or, at home in Japan, the Demio), on sale since 2007 and just being replaced with a fully redesigned model line.
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That came as a bit of a surprise, given the number of relatively youthful drivers you see whizzing around in the numerous B-seg models available in this hard-fought market, led by the perennial Ford Fiesta and Vauxhall Corsa.
Mazda is a relative minnow in the UK and plans to sell just short of 50,000 cars in fiscal year (FY) 2015 (ending 31 March, 2016) after the 40,000 units expected by the end of FY2014, boosted by the launch of the redesigned 3. The expected hike will come mainly from the new 2 and upcoming MX-5 plus the, also upcoming, CX-3 B segment SUV due about mid-year to take Mazda UK into new segment territory to battle with the likes of the Vauxhall Mokka, Ford EcoSport and class establishing Nissan Juke.
Looking at calendar year sales, of traditionally slow February 2015’s 76,958 UK industry volume, the Japanese brand accounted for 1,306 or 1.7%. Year to date: 4,646 or 1.92% of the 241,814 total market sales. 2014’s tally? 37,784 for a 1.53% share of the record-breaking industry-wide tally of 2,476,435. That compared with 31,228 (1.38%) of the 2013’s also record setting 2,264,737 total market sales.
The 2 on its own last year accounted for a fair chunk of Mazda UK’s overall sales – down 3.2% in its swansong full year to 9,031 units. Year to date 2015 volume to the end of February, with stock running out, unsurprisingly was off 11.4% to 851 cars, SMMT data showed.
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By GlobalDataThough the sales and marketing managers at market leaders Ford and Vauxhall clearly are not quivering in their boots, when you talk to Mazda Motors UK’s confident and optimistic managing director Jeremy Thomson you soon see he is planning for steady, measured growth and is excited at the opportunities the steady supply of new product from Japanese HQ in Hiroshima offers.
“We believe we have the freshest product range,” he said during the 2 media launch event. By the end of 2015, with the new 2, CX-3 and MX-5 all launched, the redesigned 3, on sale only since last October, will be the “oldest model in our range”. If you grant Thomson the just-facelifted 6 as ‘new’, his claim is completely valid.
Thomson said Mazda’s forecast fiscal 2015 growth is well above the expected flat full UK market.
“We plan to have significant growth from new product. After all, we’ve been doing it for the last few years.”
Like rivals, Mazda now enjoys considerable retail (non-fleet) sales volume. The UK unit sells tailored and rebranded Santander bank finance packages through its financial services unit and some two thirds of private buyer sales now are through a personal contract plan (PCP) where the buyer pays an initial deposit followed (usually) by three years of monthly payments which clear a majority of the outstanding balance. At the end of the term, the customer can pay the remaining balance and keep the car, hand it back with (usually) nothing to pay or roll the residual over as the deposit on a new one.
Thomson says Mazda has found it is rewarded with “greater loyalty from PCP customers as you [dealers] need to start having sensible conversations with them in the months leading up to contract end”. Said conversations more often than not lead to a happy owner finding, especially in the case of the popular outgoing 2, that there is still enough equity left in his or her three year old current car to make a deposit on the new replacement sufficient to keep the monthly payments at much the same level as before.
Result, happy, loyal-to-the-brand owners and, as Thomson puts it, the “hard work of the last three to four years [developing the PCP products, ‘selling’ them to the dealers, promoting to retail buyers] is now really paying dividends.”
Thomson reckons his current count of 137 dealers across the UK is about right. Of these, 36 are stand-alone, Mazda-only shops, 56 share showroom/facility space with other brands (Ford, for historical reasons, and Kia are most common) and 45 are stand-alone showrooms on a site shared with another brand or brands. He’s cool with that as it stands.
In terms of marketing the new 2, the UK unit reckons on selling 1,000 units in the first week of sales – dealers start delivering cars next week, officially. As it was still selling well, Mazda ordered in extra shipments from Japan of the outgoing model but will have sold out completely by then – the new range is coming from Thailand to right hand drive UK; the left hand drive models for Europe are from the new plant in Mexico.
Mazda reps took the first available pre-production cars (which will now be crushed as they’re legally unsaleable) on a 6,000-mile ‘roadshow’ tour of 120 of the 137 dealerships to demonstrate to prospective buyers; sales tools included Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets enabling a potential owner to see any view of the new model line, inside and out, in any colour and with any trim/equipment/option package.
“We [pre]sold cars we don’t have,” a Mazda insider told just-auto, meaning that it was possible to use the virtual reality tool to configure a car and display it to the potential buyer, long before actual metal in the desired exact configuration reached distributor or dealer stock.
The new 2 range consists of six trim/equipment specifications (one is a launch-only special edition) and four new, all-1.5-litre petrol engines plus one (also 1.5) diesel. There is a petrol-only, six-speed automatic transmission option as an alternative to the standard five- or six-speed manuals. The 90PS petrol engine with five-speed manual and one-up-from-entry-level SE-L trim is expected to be the most popular.
