AS JEEP Australia posts a sales lift in October of some 40 per cent year-on-year, a growth number the brand has not seen for years, if ever, company chief Kevin Flynn is taking heart that taking the great risk of confessing that they got it wrong with buyers is now paying off.

Paying big bucks for a nationwide TV Campaign in which a concerned woman tells viewers she, along with a hundred thousand others, bought a Jeep and then acknowledges that some didn’t have a pleasurable ownership experience, was gutsy stuff.

For Jeep owners with problems it was an admission by the manufacturer that things went wrong and the personal approach to address owners’ reservations about the brand, judging by the increase in sales, looks to have been well received.

The TVC marked the move from the successful I bought a Jeep campaign to the mea culpa of the I’m in campaign and the sales figures suggest that buyers are responding to the honesty.

“We grew too fast and we left some owners behind,” Mr Flynn, managing director of Jeep parent company, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) Australia, told GoAutoNews Premium.

An Englishman, Mr Flynn is 14 months into heading up FCA Australia after four years in a similar role in India, building on experience with Lexus and Jaguar Land Rover across Africa and in Germany. He went from an apprentice motor mechanic to running dealer groups and these days national sales companies.

When he arrived in Melbourne he not only found bewildered unhappy Jeep customers, he also had a disillusioned unhappy Jeep dealer group.

Today he is looking at revitalised buyer interest in the brand as a result of the I’m in campaign as well as stability in the dealer network which has bought into the brand’s plans to rebuild.

“Jeep had enjoyed tremendous growth over the years but the best way I can describe it is there was this growth in sales, but then there wasn’t the appropriate investment in care, and back-up, and in after sales operations and even in empathy for the customer.

“Throw in a few challenges and the reputation of the business gets pulled down and down.”

He said that despite problems, there remained a lot of passion for Jeep as a brand.

“There was a problem with the ingredients. Perhaps the relationships weren’t what they should have been. So we pieced together a strategy that dealers could say, yeah, we believe in this and therefore it’s worth the commitment.

“Dealers, and ourselves, knew that the only way to sustain the brand was by more people tapping on the front door, wanting to come and look at the vehicles and by them then coming into the aftercare. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, not the promise.”

Mr Flynn said improved attitudes by consumers, triggered by improved customer care and TV ads promoting trust, were playing out in social media.

“The response to the new TV ads has been phenomenal. I thought I bought a Jeep was a very clever campaign that made the desire to buy Jeep very, very high. It was incredibly successful,” he said.

“The new campaign is about bringing this back, but recast and being honest about the status that we are in and what we’re doing about it.

“It was about us recognising that we’re not where we’ve been but now this is what we’re doing. And it wasn’t what we were going to do, it was about what we are doing.”

He said it was important to him in his first few months at FCA Australia to find out the issues “and be very open and honest about those”.

“When I came here, the first thing I did was to get out there, meet the dealers – as many as I possibly could. It was very much ‘fly in, dealer, dealer, hotel, dealer, dealer, fly out’ and I saw 20-23 dealers in a very short period.

“Dealers are at the coal face. They have all the energy under the sun. But if they have bought into a franchise and they feel that they are facing all the challenges on their own, and we (Jeep) are not part of the solutions, there will be issues.

“Then we put a plan together that we took to our global executive, and they agreed to our plan completely, and we then came into the New Year (2020) with a dealer conference in February, then laid out our strategy and showed that this is where we’re going.

“I fairly quickly recruited a good complement of new directors into the business and really worked on gaining the hearts and minds of the dealers.

“I wanted the dealers to see that there was going to be a change in the organisation and outlined the historic challenges we were really going to deal with, the big one being customer trust.”

Mr Flynn said issues start with the OEM because “whatever the relationship with the dealer, if that relationship between the customer and dealer goes wrong, it comes back to us.”

“It could be that we may not have given the dealers the tools, or we may not have given the dealers the level of profitability that allowed them to work cohesively with the customer.

“Our job is to get to the hearts and minds of the dealers. I think that after the previous problems, we are now on that journey.

“Without any shadow of a doubt, we’ve improved dealers’ profitability, significantly increased the volumes and our ad campaigns are striking the right chord with consumers. The fact we have done all this in a COVID market is very, very pleasing.”

Mr Flynn said that when he arrived in Australia, there were dealers leaving the franchise.

“But I’ve got to say, we’ve got mega stability now and we have a fantastic relationship with the dealer council,” he said.

“We’re excited when we meet and when we talk. I’m really enjoying working with our dealer network and I’m just so thankful that I can now start to plan to get out and see them and show them appreciation for getting us through a very, very tough time.

“I’m delighted with the partners we’ve got and how they are demonstrating enthusiasm and how it’s transferring to sales.

“One of the indicators for me is how the dealers are forward-ordering vehicles. That demonstrates belief.

“We’ve gone from a situation of high levels of stocks in the central yards to the point now where we’re getting into fantastic efficiencies and running into shortages.

“We probably haven’t been in that position for a long time.”

By Neil Dowling