Typical
direct
response
consulting
services.
was through mobile, experiential or other
components.”
At the same time, both d’Ablaing
and Romero point to Hyundai’s marketing partners — from agency of record
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to mobile
agency Nokia Interactive (Response, July)
— as crucial to the overall integration of
DR and brand on a campaign supporting
the Genesis launch, which Miles Johnson, HMA’s manager of product public
relations, calls “a $500 million launch,”
including design, technology, marketing
and all other expenditures surrounding
the debut of the Genesis.
The Odd Couple?
Romero and d’Ablaing serve different
functions on Hyundai’s marketing and
advertising teams — and they also have
divergent professional backgrounds.
Romero, a native Southern Californian of Argentinean descent, joined
Hyundai in September 2007 to head up
the company’s Hispanic marketing department. “From there, my role increased
to handle digital marketing, as well as
general marketing and advertising,” she
contends.
Romero’s bio prior to joining HMA
reads like a “who’s who” of corporate
marketing. “I started my career at Honda,
handling international marketing,” she
says. “I was responsible for Latin American marketing.”
She then moved into the technology
sector, joining Toshiba, handling “general
market, U.S. Hispanic and international
marketing,” before jumping back into the
automotive space at Chrysler, where, she
contends, she enjoyed her greatest career
success (see sidebar, page 40).
“I was the head of California marketing for Chrysler,” she says. “I worked on
restructuring and rebranding the three
Chrysler brands — Chrysler, Jeep and
Dodge — in California. The goal was to
lift market share and change the brand
image.”
On the other hand, d’Ablaing is a
Hyundai mainstay, joining the company
as a cost analyst in 1994, only about two
years after graduating from the University
of Southern California. After working
his way up to senior financial analyst,
the company assisted him in gaining
his MBA. At about the same time, he
transitioned from the finance side of the
business in late 2002 into the marketing
area. “I worked on a number of the sports
marketing programs,” he says.
Within a year, d’Ablaing was asked by
the director of marketing to move to the
company’s digital marketing department.
“At that time, we were responsible for
the redesign of
hyundaiusa.com,” he says.
“Now, we have deployed about 18 different sites.”
The divergent backgrounds of Romero
and d’Ablaing have come together with
Hyundai’s somewhat star-crossed history in the United States. When HMA
brought the Excel subcompact to America in 1986, the automaker’s brand found
itself ghettoized for the better part of a
decade. However, since the mid-1990s,
Hyundai’s growth — both in sales and
image, thanks to a top-notch customer
service reputation — has remade the
brand’s image.
Mobile Answers the DR Call
The latest step to bolstering Hyundai’s
image is the new Genesis, which is designed to compete with models from such
luxury brands as Lexus, BMW, Cadillac and Mercedes. The company has
maximized its technology and innovation
in this single car, which Romero says
shouldn’t be a surprise.
“It’s interesting because when consumers think of the Hyundai brand, they
may not always think of innovation and
technology,” she says. “Yet that’s really
what we’re about — for everything from
our product line up to the technology in
our vehicles.”
She contends that the company’s marketing strategy mirrors those concepts.
“One of the things we’re trying to do
from the marketing standpoint is to try to
take this technology aspect that is prevalent throughout the company and the
brand and take it to the marketing mix,”
Romero says.
