Honda Australia has revised down its sales targets for this year -- but car buyers will still likely be able to haggle a deal during its last-ditch sales blitz before Christmas.
The near-prestige Japanese brand was hoping to sell 50,000 cars this year but its sales rate has fallen well short. With just three months remaining it would have to sell cars at more than double the rate it has been selling them so far this year to achieve the original target.
Instead, Honda has wound back its national sales target to 40,000 vehicles -- a figure which should be achievable but will still require a big sales push.
Honda sales are down 3.4 per cent so far this year in a market that is up by 14.5 per cent -- but September was a shocker for the brand. Sales went into freefall -- down 34.5 per cent compared with the same month last year, with Honda shifting just 2400 cars.
With a little over 30,000 sales so far in 2010, Honda needs to sell about 4000 new cars a month for the last three months of the year to hit its new target, which means Honda customers are likely to find dealers will do sharper prices than they have in the past.
"Certainly we won't achieve 50,000 this year... We expect to finish the year in the low 40,000s, that's still a lot of motor cars," Lindsay Smalley, senior director of Honda Australia, told the Carsales Network at a preview event in the lead up to the Sydney motor show on Monday.
"We've got a strong retail offer in the market place in October -- every Honda has a five-year warranty, and... a $3000 bonus on Accord, strong limited edition offers on CR-V, Jazz and Civic, and on October 23 it's our once a year day sale."
Last year, Honda offered an extended, five-year warranty as part of its once-a-year sale. But it will have to come up with something else now that the five-year warranty is already on offer.
"We don't want to say what it is just yet, but we think we have an exciting offer," Smalley said.
In the meantime, expect to see new ad themes from Honda as it does less retail price advertising and more brand building. The animated 'What if? What Next?' ads use actor and comedian Stephen Fry in the voiceover.
"It's fair to say in the last two years we've had a lot of retail focus and our intention is to shift much more strongly into a brand focus," said Smalley.
"This is a long-term brand strategy as opposed to an immediate term retail push. Longer term we see it as being highly successful."
However, he said, Honda would still run retail ads at the same time.
Honda Australia marketing manager Kevin Lilley said the company was doing "more than a few new ads, it's a new marketing strategy".
He said the company did a lot of soul searching and extensive consumer research before drafting the new campaign.
"As part of this process we conducted a comprehensive research program to get to the heart of our customers and what our customers were thinking," he said.
"Some of those findings were interesting, not only were there positives but there were a number of negatives as well.
"One of the exercises was we got customers to imagine they were going down a hallway and to walk into a room, a white room with Honda branding on it. And we got them to describe the sorts of things they saw in that room.
"Honda was seen as fun and funky from some customers but equally from others we were seen as boring and conservative. From other customers we were seen as stylish and sophisticated but at the same time ... we were seen as dated and old fashioned. Other customers told us we were warm and engaging while others said we were cold and clinical. They told us they want us to be more human, more personal, more alive, more exciting."
Honda Australia has cracked the 50,000 mark only three times in the past 10 years -- its record of 60,529 was set in 2007.
The carmaker is under increasing pressure from Honda Japan to perform given the strong growth of Mazda in Australia, even though Mazda is a much smaller rival in its homeland, Japan.
Honda will also have to get its growth without the addition of the luxury Acura brand -- or the rumoured small city car that is destined to be built in India and Thailand.
Honda has sold 30,677 cars to September. Last month it lost more market share than any other brand on the Australian new car market and was overtaken by Subaru.
Read the latest Carsales Network news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at carsales' mobile site...