I just managed to lose an essay-length post detailing the divergent fortunes of Kia and Jeep in Australia over the past decade and the lessons those two trajectories hold for Chinese brands seeking to establish themselves here. I'm not going to rewrite that lost essay, but here are the core points:
In 2014, Jeep finished in 12th position with 30,408 sales, ahead of Kia in 13th position with 28,005 sales. Significantly, this is roughly where GWM is today, finishing 2023 in 13th position with 36,397 sales. From these similar starting positions, the sales trajectories of Kia and Jeep have diverged sharply over the past decade. Kia finished 2023 in 4th position with 76,120 sales, while Jeep finished in 30th position with 4,634 sales. The trajectories of the two brands are continuing to diverge, with Jeep sales in 2024 down a further 40% YoY, while Kia is likely to strengthen further going forward as it expands into new market segments, most significantly the high-volume ute segment with Tasman from early 2025. Indeed, I suspect that Kia may well emerge as the #2 brand in Australia within the next few years.
How did Kia accomplish this? The foundation of mainstream success is offering compelling vehicles at attractive prices. Yet this by itself is clearly insufficient, because Hyundai sales have historically dominated Kia's in Australia despite their vehicles sharing common engineering underpinnings and similar price points. In 2014 the Hyundai:Kia sales ratio was 3.6:1, which was not an outlier. The major salient difference is that Hyundai entered the market here in the mid-1980s while Kia did not arrive until the late 1990s. Hyundai had simply built up more brand equity here than Kia, such that even those who were prepared to take a gamble on a Korean vehicle were more inclined to choose Hyundai. Kia didn't have a product issue on its hands so much as a brand perception issue. And in 2014 they set out to address that problem by offering a then-unprecedented 7-year comprehensive warranty, and making that warranty the centrepiece of an ongoing national marketing campaign:
“We knew we had a quality product that was well suited to Australia,” says [Chris Forbes, National Fleet Manager at Kia Australia], “but we needed to give buyers a reason to look harder at the Kia brand. In a way we needed to give them ‘permission’ to buy Kia.”
The figures back Forbes’ assessment. The seven-year warranty was introduced late in 2014 and the following year saw a rise in sales of 20% to give Kia their best year ever. 2016 saw an even bigger rise (26%) and an appearance in the top ten selling marques. Forbes believes the knock-on effects from that 2014 decision are what led to Kia being the automotive powerhouse it is today. He talks about the warranty being a “bold decision” - the standard warranties in Australia at that time were 3 or 5 years - and points out that even today it is the longest, most comprehensive warranty available in Australia.
“What we did was to display our own faith in the brand. The warranty meant that people could be confident and that improved the residual values and that was where fleet really started to pay attention.”
Kia also introduced local suspension tuning for Australian road conditions and handling preferences as a point of differentiation from Hyundai, which has never performed local tuning here. And I believe the final piece of the re-branding puzzle was Kia's 2021 decision to discard its old, rather ugly logo in favour of its new, far more attractive one. GWM brands, take note.
As for Jeep, some of its declining fortunes can be attributed to the strengthening USD coupled with what I understand is Jeep's push in America to take the brand upmarket, the combination resulting in some eyebrow-raising price increases these last few years. But the real damage runs deeper than that, with a narrative having developed and become entrenched here of Jeep as offering poor reliability and worse support with stratospheric parts pricing. The narrative was clear enough that Jeep Australia sought to address it directly a couple of years ago, announcing new policies regarding the pricing and management of spare parts inventories amidst a general "mea culpa" campaign:
“We messed up, we’re fixing it, and we’re going to take care of you,” [Global boss of Jeep] Christian Meunier said of the Australian market.
The car-maker is working on repairing its relationship with disgruntled owners of vehicles like the current Jeep Grand Cherokee, which has been plagued by reliability issues and a record number of vehicle recalls.
“We need to treat the customers well, take care of them and whenever there is an issue they need to be heard, they need to be listened to,” he said. “And I think if we do those things, the sky’s the limit for Jeep in Australia, that’s really what I believe.
Once narratives have become established, they're difficult to shift, and Jeep's position in 2024 is dire enough that the brand must surely be considering its position in the country. When you're being outsold by Ssanyong, it's probably time to go.
The moral of the story here for Chinese brands seeking to establish themselves in the Australian market is simple: be more like Kia, less like Jeep. Australia is a conservative market, and customer confidence in in the brand is everything. It's not enough to do things right, one has to be
seen to be doing things right, which involves marketing. Toyota doesn't dominate the market here because its vehicles are that much better than its competitors, but because people associate the Toyota badge with reliability, capability, and support.