"You set long-term and ambitious objectives not knowing when you’ll hit them, but if you’re not ambitious, you won’t grow even if your ambitions are such that it takes a long time to get there.”
Paul Philpott, president and CEO of Kia in the UK, set a hugely ambitious goal 15 years ago, when he joined Kia, for the brand to reach 100,000 sales. The goal back then, when Kia was selling around 30,000 cars a year, could be seen as fanciful. A decade and a half on, only Audi, BMW, Ford, Toyota and Volkswagen sit above it in the sales charts, and Kia grew by more than all of them last year.
Upon Philpott’s arrival, Kia was seen as a maker of cheap cars, and the brand image was just as budget. The scrappage scheme that came from the credit crunch in 2009 helped propel the brand more into the mainstream, and it coincided with the arrival of the first cars designed by Peter Schreyer, the esteemed designer who joined Kia from the Volkswagen Group.
“Once scrappage came along and took us past 50,000 in 2010/11, at that point we then had the momentum and the new cars, as well as the seven-year warranty across the board,” said Philpott. “Then 100,000 became the obvious next target.”
Philpott’s strategy was three-pronged, and no matter what the challenges of the industry he has stuck to them for more than a decade.
“One is to make the brand and the products desirable. Second is to have the best possible dealers, who are also profitable. And three is that once customers have bought into the brand, to make sure they stay with it. Though there have been different iterations of these, they have always stayed consistent.”
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