Now Kia, still saddled with a cheap and cheerful image in the eyes of some buyers, is jumping in and beginning to reap the benefits of a huge experience centre it opened a few months ago in South Korea’s capital, Seoul.
It is in good company and the Korean car-maker hopes that doing what the Europeans do with their lavish brand centres will rub off on the perceptions of the Kia brand.
Mercedes-Benz is well down this track. Not content with the impressive Mercedes-Benz centre at Brooklands south of London which includes a roads complex, museum and hotel, the company is now rolling out more, albeit more modest, experience centres.
It opened its Mercedes me store Melbourne last week in the city’s CBD at the Rialto building as the seventh such experience centre opened by the company around the world.
Audi City in central London’s Mayfair, opened in 2012 just before the London Olympics, is now so popular that it is on the city’s guided tour list along with the Ritz Hotel and the Fortnum & Mason food store.
The 427 square-metre store, a joint venture between Audi and the Penske Automotive Group, can sell cars but is more about advising guests. It uses giant wall-mounted screens to show new vehicles and colour and cabin colour and fabric choices.
Other manufacturers that use similar store-front display cases include Renault, BMW and Citroen.
Kia’s experience centre, though vastly bigger than the compact Audi City store in London, offers the same type of service.
Its Beat 360 “brand exhibition space” in Seoul’s Gangnam shopping district is designed as a space to showcase Kia vehicles and have places for guests to relax and socialise.
The concept is not designed primarily for direct sales and only averages 15 sales a month. The emphasis is on exposing visitors to the brand and its products.
The interior is divided into zones, each with a different theme, opening with the cafe zone with a Stonic SUV on display. There is a garden zone complete with vehicles you expect to see in an out-of-town location – the Sorento, Sportage and Niro SUVs – with an accessory area and a five-hole minigolf course.
Then there is a salon zone, for business customers with leather armchairs and dark-wood furniture, that displays the Stinger.
Beat 360 also has a technology centre that includes access to an interactive movie, The Little Prince, that uses Hollywood-quality special effects; a virtual reality Stinger racing experience, using the Microsoft HoloLens system (the only such use in Korea, claims Kia) and an augmented reality headset system that displays information about the models on display.
The centre is an expensive entertainment area for prospective car buyers but it could be the next new way to get these future buyers through the door and acquaint them with the product, even though there may be no guarantee of immediate sales.
Kia Motors chief marketing officer Chun-kwan Suh said in a company statement on the Beat 360 concept that it “takes customer experience to the next level”.
For now the company will experiment with the centre to assess its impact on the brand in its home market. Kia’s said it had no immediate plans to expand the Beat 360 concept to other cities.
The progressive nature of the Beat 360 outlet and its design to reach new buyers dovetails with Kia’s plan to launch 106 new models – 38 all-new and 14 with alternative powerplants – within the next five years. It has also announced autonomous features on its cars by 2020 and full autonomy by 2030.
The Kia brand is now the 69th most valuable in researcher Interbrand’s 2017 Best Global Brand report, and is the 11th most valuable automotive brand.
Its brand value, said Interbrand, is now $A8.75 billion, up six per cent on 2016.
By Neil Dowling
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