Tired of getting sand kicked in its face, Ford Australia is about to roll up its sleeves and make a $10 million marketing impression in the small car market.
Indeed, the Blue Oval's dealers have already been told to prepare for the marketing push which will support the revised Focus range due in August.
The first stage in the new small car sales drive was this week's announcement of a new $19,990 starting price for Focus with ABS on all models.
A more logical model sequence with the same levels available in sedan and hatchback body styles peaking at $30,000 is also part of the new strategy.
A new diesel in both sedan and hatchback body styles at a surprisingly competitive $27,000 (more soon at The Carsales Network) followed by the Coupe Cabriolet, in conjunction with the existing XR5 Turbo, will generate one of the widest single nameplate ranges in the small car segment.
Significantly, reports of the latest marketing push suggest that Ford Australia has recognised that these latest pricing and range revisions will not be enough to achieve sales success alone.
For some years, dealers have questioned whether Focus should have been rebadged as a Laser on its 2002 arrival.
Ford has always responded that the Focus, which is Ford's very own European small car, marked a new direction and couldn't be further removed from the Laser it replaced. Never a variation of a Mazda 323 (as was the Laser), the Focus ultimately supplied the platform for the hugely successful Mazda 3 and smaller Volvo models.
It is this huge contrast in acceptance between the Focus and Mazda 3 locally that continues to haunt local Ford executives.
At first, Ford claimed that it is never easy to launch a new nameplate. As Focus fortunes remained static, the maker then pinned its hopes on the latest range, claiming that the new model launched in 2005 would soon achieve the cut through that Focus deserved.
After the new model failed to reach expectations (generated partly by supply constraints and rectification of several production issues), Ford has since suggested that the switch from the Laser to Focus in September 2002 was overshadowed by the launch of the BA Falcon.
When Toyota has switched from Starlet to Echo to Yaris and watched sales soar at each changeover and the Honda Jazz has come from nowhere over a similar time period, perhaps Ford has been forced to consider that something else might be at work.
Since the early 1980s, Ford buyers shopping for a car in the 1.5-2.0-litre range have been forced to wade through the Escort, Cortina, Laser, Meteor, Telstar, Corsair, Mondeo and Focus nameplates. Early Focus advertising which highlighted the model's abstract European qualities did little to tell buyers where it sat relative to this unusually high number of dead nameplates.
According to some seasoned motor traders, the "smooth" advertising campaign that launched the current Focus in 2005 dumbed down the nameplate and unnecessarily risked alienating informed buyers.
Ford's local Focus experience has close parallels with the failed Nissan Tiida campaign that featured Kim Cattrall. More recently Nissan has concentrated on telling Australian buyers that Tiida is the Pulsar replacement. A lesson learned, perhaps?
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