So Far, So Good...

IIPM PUBLICATION

When it comes to ensuring that your brand shines amidst the clutter of automotive foreign and indigenous auto brands, high on octane, and grossly involved in the blood-bath on Indian highways, there remains only two choices before the players – ‘to kill’ or ‘to perish’. Rajeev Chaba, CMD, General Motors India, speaks exclusively to 4Ps B&M on how GM India has rightfully chosen the former...

4Ps B&M: How did the GM brandbuilding start and where does it stand as of date?

R.C.: When we started our operations in India in 1995, GM’s strategy was to position Opel as a global brand. In that context we started with Opel products. Opel Astra was the first and Opel Corsa came second. Then, Opel was a German niche, premium brand, with perhaps Opel Astra being the next best car after Mercedes. In time, we realised that we had to get into the mass segment. Thus we needed a mainstream brand for a mainstream segment.

Also, we realised that a European sourced product for a mainstream segment will not be of right value for Indian consumers. So it was decided that Chevy would be the mainstream brand for this country. But with Opel, we had already got an insight into Indian consumer psyche, a good customer base and a strong dealer-network system. We also understand a lot from Indian legal perspective. So GM was ready to brave into a second phase of its India expedition. Then we went for a midcourse correction, and in the mean time GM realised thatfrom mainstream perspective Chevy has got the right DNA to become a global brand.

Slowly it also dawned that there is nothing called made in a particular country tag like made in China, Japan or Germany. In terms of brand strategy of Chevrolet we said that positioning of Chevy has to be mainstream plus. It means that we want to create an aspiration for the brand, where we are able to charge a premium over other mainstream brand and that extra value we should be able to command because of certain USP’s of Chevrolet.

We also realised that we needed to offer plus in terms of service aspects too. We extended the service warranty to three years where normally the competition was offering two years and today, Spark is the only car in its segment to offer 3 years warranty. So that is the plus.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2007

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative