ICM

Integrated Marketing Communication: Volkswagen in UK and Turkey

Integrated Marketing Communication: Volkswagen in UK and Turkey

Introduction

1.1 History of Volkswagen

Volkswagen was established in 1930's and today it is one of the biggest automobile manufacturers in the world based in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. Volkswagen is the fourth largest car producer in the world after Toyota, Ford and GM. The word Volkswagen means 'People's car' in German. The first introduction of Polo was in 1975 and until 2011 it has been produced in five different generations. Today, Volkswagen has manufacturing plants in 19 European countries and 8 countries in America, Asia and Africa (Hopfinger, 1971, p. 16).

According to Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles Global Sales Director Hans Heiner Tuting, Volkswagen has showed a great growth in terms of commercial vehicles. Turkey has a good automobile market and facilities of manufacturing. Over the period of ten years Volkswagen has grown step by step in Turkey. Volkswagen has been number three in market share in Turkey for last two years.

Additionally, Volkswagen sold 174,655 vehicles in 2010 in UK for an 8.6% market share. Polo and Golf models are the most preferred among the other models in UK (www.volkswagenag.com).

Marketing Communication

Marketing communication is a kind of management process which has different organisations for various audiences. These organisations search to develop and give messages for identified customer groups by understanding their communication environment. For the second step, responses are evaluated. Conveying the messages encourages to audiences to offer attitudinal and behavioural responses (Fill, 2006, p. 4).

Volkswagen slogan “Das Auto”

2.1 Brand Objectives and Strategy

Brand objectives and strategies are significant in terms of identification of long and short term plans, development of companies and proving themselves in the market. Apart from the model of Polo, Volkswagen has tried to satisfy its customers with various models by manufacturing innovative and satisfactory car models until now.

Undoubtedly, customer expectations from the twenty first century about the car technology have been changing. Today, fuel efficiency is one of the most competitive advantages among the car companies. Especially in Turkey, people show a huge interest for car models which have this feature because of the high oil prices. Although this situation is a little different in UK, because of the high insurance costs people need to save on petrol.

Volkswagen Polo TDI gave importance to this and it won the Total Economy Run 2010 as the most fuel efficient car model in South Africa. 1.6 Polo TDI completed the 1 100 km route in Free State just with average fuel consumption of 4.1litres/100 km (Volkswagen, 2012). Apparently, Volkswagen has a great success with new Polo thanks to its advantage of fuel efficiency. Moreover, the new Polo models are set new standards by extremely clean, fuel efficient engines with intelligent vehicles design. Reduction of CO2 emission and environmental compatibility are distinguishing features (Taylor, 2012. P. 151).

2.2 Target Market

Volkswagen had made a deliberate decision and needed to emulate all the strong characteristics of the Golf but this time on new smaller ...