Driver’s Choice: 5 Questions With Mazda CMO Russell Wager

Mazda isn’t feeling the summer doldrums. The automaker is trying to grow its US market share by moving its brand and vehicles upscale, so the brand doesn’t have the luxury of standard summer clearance promotions to move 2017 models at a time of year when that’s exactly what many of its competitors are doing.

Instead, Mazda is running a branding campaign, “Driver’s Choice,” which features real people (premium car owners) in a sort of blind taste test of Mazda versus other vehicles. Mazda conceals the identities of its own models and identifying marks of premium vehicles in the same segment. The upshot: The majority of those surveyed preferred Mazda vehicles when they didn’t know the identity of the brands.

That aligns with what Mazda CMO Russell Wager has been trying to do for the past few years: give Mazda’s brand and vehicles a premium cachet at affordable prices. So long, the “zoom-zoom” imagery of the sporty but inexpensive Mazda; welcome to bold comparisons with Acura, Infiniti and other avowed premium brands.

“This is continuing what we’ve started with our communications, telling people about our quality and that with Mazda you can get what you would be expecting from a premium brand,” Wager (right) told brandchannel.

As part of its efforts to buff up the overall brand, Mazda is also nurturing a number of sub-brands and subsidiary concepts that enhance overall appreciation for its cars and marque.

These include Skyactiv, a suite of technology and weight-saving features across all of its cars; “Kodo,” which Mazda calls its dynamic exterior design language that is resulting in highly streamlined new vehicles; and now “Jinba Ittai,” which Mazda says is the connection that drivers feel with the vehicle, which it has been enhancing with heightened mechanical responsiveness in its smaller vehicles.

Mazda also is pursuing certain demographics more determinedly. The brand just launched a new digital campaign aimed at the Hispanic community, aiming to tap into the group’s existing positive affinity for Japanese-made products, Mazda said.

We spoke with Wager for more insights:

BC: Typically, summer promotions are not necessarily strategic but tactical. Which is “Driver’s Choice”?

Russell Wager: This isn’t a throwaway. We don’t do events like that. It’s continuing our overall strategy of trying to promote Mazda’s brand and products as an alternative to premium. This campaign goes head to head with premium competitors. It coincides with typical [summer] event times, and we’ll tell consumers what offers are out there.

How is the effort going to make Mazda a more premium brand? 

We monitor transaction prices. They’re continuing to increase across the lineup. Second, we have some of our own studies, and questions we ask target consumers include, “Are you willing to pay more for a Mazda? Do you consider Mazda to be premium?” We’ve seen those measures increase over the last couple of years. Those are a couple of key ones that say it’s resonating.

How does “Driver’s Choice” relate to the bigger “Driving Matters” campaign? 

We’re doing a combination of things within the Driving Matters campaign. We’re starting to talk about craftsmanship and design, that is Koda design. We’re talking about the technology, with Skyactiv and those elements. So “Driving Matters” is a combination of things.

Not only are you trying to feel how the car handles and performs, you’re seeing how easy it is to use the controls, and do I feel like I’m in a car that is a step above. It all feeds into the communications in the Driving Matters campaign.

Your position has been different on the move to self-driving cars than the rest of the industry, and of course that plays into your “Driving Matters” mantra. Do you think that the more “premium” a customer is in the future, the more he or she will actually want to drive?

Public opinion is everyone is going to want autonomous cars. But our target customer right now doesn’t. It wants to be in control and maintain that control. That’s why for our safety technologies, we have all of our active-safety features that are designed not to take control away from the driver but to alert the driver when something is coming on that could cause them danger, and only at the last possible second do we take it away from them.

And as we go forward and look to consumers who somewhere down the line want autonomous cars, we’ll proably continue that philosophy and [enact automatic safety measures] at the last possible second. We’re definitely researching [autonomous driving] to see where we might want to head. If that’s where customers want to go we’ll have an offering that meets that expectation.

Why are you launching a campaign specifically aimed at Hispanic Americans?

It’s something we weren’t taking great advantage of. People have decent awareness about Mazda in the Hispanic community but don’t now about our heritage and history and don’t know that we’re Japanese; they knew we were Asian.

This campaign was specifically designed to communicate our Japanese heritage and philosophy and then goes right back into what we talk about in Driving Matters: craftsmanship and performance. These are core values that line up with the Hispanic community that we’re going to speak to.

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