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Hyundai to improve its brand image and bottom line with rebrand

Hyundai Motor Company Australia wants to lift its brand perception beyond the ‘driveaway special’ mentality that drove much of its sales success in the past to a more premium, profitable business model – entrenching the Korean brand as the number-three manufacturer in Australia behind Toyota and Mazda.

HMCA marketing director Kevin Goult described Hyundai’s new ‘Imagine That’ tagline as about looking forward.

“We’re not ashamed about where we came from, but we’re passionate, enthusiastic and driven about where we’re going to go, and that’s where ‘Imagine That’ starts to come from,” he said.

“Hyundai is a brand that’s well-recognised in Australia, by Australians, for the great product that we have.

“But how do we move the brand forward to a point where we look at what our product stands for? There’s no better time for us to reposition our brand here than at a time when we’ve got 18 new models.

“It’s a mix of SUV, of high-performance, of passenger – what better time to start changing our business and talking about our brand in an entirely new way?

“We do need to be seen as technologically advanced, we do need to be seen and recognised as fun to drive, and I think we’re ticking those – proud to own and worth paying more for.”

Chief operating officer John Kett said key to the company’s brandperception strategy was removing its reliance on price-focused vehicles and pushing volume in the $40,000 to $55,000 segment – a traditional weakness.

“Prior to COVID, we had a lot of cars that were price-pointed – the driveaway pricing where the factory puts in from day one and the dealer gives up a significant portion of their variable trading margin,” he said.

“Effectively what we’ve done is remove that when launching our new cars.

“I think we’re in a space now where our brand has to work a little bit harder, but I think it’s recognised for building better cars.

“We’re definitely growing up – exercising a little bit of commercial mindset, putting dollars in the bank so that we can brand ourselves.

“We just need to give the cars a little bit more edge out there and how they’re presented in the marketplace.

“You’ll very rarely see a white car in advertising now, you’ll never see a Go or entry trim – the majority will see our best gear,” he said.

“We still want to sell as many cars as we can, but we want to keep that discipline.”

As for the $40,000 to $55,000 segment, Mr Kett said it was a real challenge, both at the top end of Tucson

and the bottom end of Santa Fe. “It’s like a vacuum for us,” he said.

“We can sell as many Santa Fe Highlanders or Palisade Highlanders as we can build, but there was no middle ground, if that makes sense, so we’re starting to see that as our next challenge – that’s where we want to succeed and new-generation Tucson will help us get there.”

Which comes back to the profitability of the brand and HMCA’S positioning in the future – both in the marketplace and inside the corporation.

“Our ‘18 in 18’ – 18 models in 18 months – was a big undertaking,” Mr Kett said.

“It’s hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and we needed to lift the pricing, to lift the profitability, so we could bring the next version of ‘18 in 18’ and make sure that right-hand drive doesn’t become one of those economic challenges for us.

“We want to be number three in the marketplace, we’d love to keep that.

“Doing it without a ute is becoming harder and harder, but we do it. When we go like-for-like with our competitors we hold ourselves quite well.”

As for the Santa Cruz ute, it’s definitely defunct for Australia this time around.

“But I think over time, things will naturally progress to a state where Santa Cruz could be,” Mr Kett said.

“When I think about the billions of dollars that have gone into Hyundai’s recent product roll-out, the corporation is very sensitive to the ute – so sensitive they just don’t want to even talk about it – but they monitor it. So I can imagine it’s in the washing somewhere along the line.

“But we need to get this right, and for us, we need to demonstrate that we can still maintain scale in this country, more profitably than we have been.

“More doors open up when you can get a bit of profitability around the product.”