On the occasion of the Beijing Winter Olympics, watching the South Korean delegation so "struggling" on and off the field, I can't help but think of Kia. At the end of last year, we just finished talking about the "breakup" between Dongfeng and Kia, and recently we finally saw the news that Kia and Jiangsu Yueda Group will further increase investment cooperation. It is reported that the new joint venture plans to increase capital by 900 million US dollars, through expanding investment, introducing new models, developing new energy vehicles, setting up export bases, etc., to rapidly increase vehicle sales and capacity utilization, and will release a new company name in April this year.
The new company is obviously Kia's final say, in the face of the existing "mess", "monopoly of power" can indeed effectively improve operational efficiency, let go. However, this may still be a "pit", because the product's collective crotch problem will not be solved for a while and a half, including the K5 Kaiku we want to focus on today.
Why talk about K5 Kaiku first, which needs to first clarify the significance of a medium-sized car for traditional car companies, especially the joint venture brand, that is not just a simple sales, but a bonus to enhance the brand image, domestic consumers also value this most, we can look at the current more successful joint venture brands in China, they will have excellent sales of medium-sized cars "support façade". To put it simply, a mid-size car that is a good and seated car is the basic criterion for measuring the quality of a car company.
The data will not deceive people, and the fiasco of K5 Kaiku in sales also reflects the sluggishness of the entire brand. The continued decline in kia's brand reputation has also affected consumer recognition of products. You know, for the former Dongfeng Yueda Kia, the significance of the new generation of K5 Kaiku launched is far greater than the sales level, it is known as a strategic product for the younger generation of consumers, but also shoulders the brand's responsibility of "eliminating low-end cars", the results are cold. It is worth mentioning that even if the sales of K5 Kaiku are miserable enough, and a larger proportion of this is still from the 1.5T model, to put it bluntly, buying it is cheap, and its forced "dimensionality reduction blow" has even sunk to the compact car market.
Model positioning failed. Looking at the domestic medium-sized car market, the models that flaunt the sport are basically not selling well, and consumers are more of a high-quality pursuit of this level of products, that is to say, the Concept of Intermediate Cars is still more willing to choose high-value products. K5 Kaiku is obviously not a believer in evil, insisting on emphasizing the sports body structure design and chassis tuning, sneakback body design, etc., and it took half a day to be bought by more users.
"Lost the watermelon to pick up sesame", as mentioned earlier, the audience of the sports medium-sized car is very small, and then we combine the actual car experience of the netizens to see the failure of K5 Kaiku in the "trade-off" of model positioning. First of all, lower center of gravity, more exquisite suspension and other sporty tuning although it provides better driving pleasure, but it makes the comfort greatly reduced, such as the handling of bumpy road surfaces, and even a lot of user feedback chassis scratching; followed by sound insulation problems, including engine noise, tire noise, wind noise, especially high-speed road conditions; in addition, the 1.5T model with higher sales share of 7-speed dry dual-clutch transmission has also been complained about by netizens as "simple matching", while overseas 1.6T models are equipped with 8-speed automatic transmissions.
Marketing strategies fail. In order to make the new K5 Kaiku listed a hit, Dongfeng Yueda Kia began a domestic marathon promotion and publicity activity that lasted for nearly 10 months before its listing, during which the media organized a series of media test drive activities and tasting meetings such as overseas test drive, Yancheng factory test drive, Yantai test drive, etc., and changed the pattern from different dimensions to publicize K5 Kaiku, and the press release was wave after wave, online and offline. Some media have also made special statistics, and the data is also quite beautiful, including about 12,200,000 K5 Kaiku related graphics or videos found on Baidu; Sogou has 159,342 pieces of content, plus headlines, 360 searches, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Kuaishou and other graphics and video content The total number of graphics and video content will not be less than 30 million. If you read or watch each article an average of 100 times, the number of exposures exceeds 3 billion times."
But unfortunately, such a long promotion and communication cycle and such a large amount of communication have been hit by water, obviously the effect of communication is not only to see the amount of exposure, but also to look at the quality and the taste of consumers, if filled with a large number of tedious content, similar content, inferior content, the communication efficiency will be greatly weakened, even if there is a amount is white, and even will cause the viewer to resent. K5 Kaiku this wave of marketing is quite a bit of laborious and unflattering meaning, the money is spent, tired, and the effect received is very small.
Underselling further erodes the retention rate. We mentioned earlier that in the total sales of K5 Kaiku 2021, the lower price of the 1.5T model accounted for more, obviously the consumers who bought the car are running cheap, and the large discount and the brand influence that is not very good cause the retention rate of K5 Kaiku to also rank at the end of the joint venture mid-size sedan. Again, this level of consumers will not choose you simply because you are cheaper, but need the "double insurance" of the brand and the product.
Not much to sell, lots of glitches. We briefly looked at the complaint report of the car and found that the problems of the new generation of K5 Kaiku are not old and young, which covers the engine, transmission, steering system and so on.
At the end of writing, I can't help but sigh that Kia is thinking of selling cars in China as simple as it is, not blindly engaging in sports and fighting for prices, but more importantly, brand, word of mouth and meeting the needs of a wider range of consumers, especially models like medium-sized cars that can be "raised", must conform to market laws. I believe that after the company's regroupment, Kia will definitely have a series of positive changes, hoping to reflect on the past while stepping on the actual thinking about the future, and return to the mainstream of the joint venture brand as soon as possible.