Word: krafcik
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...John Krafcik, president and CEO of Hyundai Motor America, is now able to do something rare for automakers: boast. "U.S. car buyers have responded in record numbers to high-quality, award-winning Hyundai products," he says. More significantly, praise is coming from Consumer Reports, J.D. Power & Associates' Initial Quality Survey and a panel of journalists at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit who named Hyundai's Genesis the 2009 Car of the Year. (See the best cars from the 2009 Detroit Auto Show...
...Hyundai has a reputation for selling cars to the budget-minded. But last year, as U.S. auto sales plunged, incentives such as rebates and fancy financing schemes weren't moving wheels off the lots as they usually did. John Krafcik, chief executive of the American subsidiary of the South Korean carmaker, polled consumers to find out why. The answer: fear. "The root cause was not that the deals weren't good," Krafcik says. "So many of them said, 'I'm afraid of losing...
...management team began searching for ways to drive around this mental block. The solution was as direct as it was unusual: Hyundai would promise to take back vehicles from buyers who got sacked within one year of their purchases. Tossing a marketing campaign together in just five weeks, Krafcik had ads running on TV by early January, in time for the much watched National Football League playoffs. The offer instantly grabbed headlines across the country. "Give them credit, they made some noise," says Gary Dilts, a senior vice president at auto-research firm J.D. Power in Troy, Mich. Hyundai...
...Hyundai believes it did much more than that. Based on company research, Krafcik figures the program boosted sales by 10% from what they would have been otherwise. That was more than enough for Hyundai to outdistance rivals. True, Hyundai's U.S. sales fell 3.6% overall in the first four months of 2009 from the same period a year earlier. But total auto demand plunged more than 37%, so Hyundai's U.S. market share actually jumped to 4.3% compared with 2.8% the year before. "We're hopeful that [Hyundai's gains] are sustainable," Krafcik says. And the program hasn't backfired...
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