21 August 2011

Renault’s clearly got the right idea with its push to improve quality and all the indications are that both its products and services are making significant leaps forward, but I have to take issue with the marketing of this, hopefully long term, improvement.

We all know that reputations stick, bad ones particularly so. Just ask Skoda – a brand with superb (forgive the pun) quality cars yet consumers who still won’t touch the badge.

Those of us in and out of cars every day see changes appear very quickly. But for most retail buyers only changing cars every three years, things change at a slower pace.

So, for Renault advertising to suddenly request buyers choose ‘Renault quality’, when their view is probably still based on knowledge from three years ago, isn’t necessarily going to work.
Renault would no doubt point out that the message is backed by an improved warranty (from September) showing faith in their own claims.

However, I can’t help feeling the warranty offering isn’t going far enough given there are plenty of five-year or longer warranty offering available elsewhere.

For me, though, it was the rather perplexing ‘Renault quality made’ slogan that’s now going to be on all Renault communication that doesn’t quite make grammatical sense and makes me question the firm’s ability to get other things right.

So is a slogan such as ‘Renault quality made’ helping or hindering retail sales, or has the message been lost in translation between the marketing department and the retailer?

I’m sure you’ll let me know.

Tristan Young
Editorial Director
Auto Retail Network
 

Tags: quality, Renault, This Week, warranty