One on One with Robert Bradshaw, VP and General Manager of Nissan North America
 Robert Bradshaw |
By Marty Bernstein
Contributing Editor, AIADA
There’s so much news recently and so much
more new news coming from Nissan that about all I can comment is a
thoughtful – Whew! A quick rundown
includes:
•Relocation of Nissan and Infiniti
headquarters to
•Groundbreaking for a new corporate
headquarters building;
•Changes and promotions in divisional
managerial personnel;
•Revised corporate communications
department;
•New marketing and advertising campaign;
and,
•Announcement of new
vehicles.
 |
|
Design of the new Nissan Headquarters for management of
North American operations in Franklin, TN. The headquarters is scheduled to
open mid-2008. |
That’s the good news. The not so good news has been a slowdown in sales, which has been addressed, I’ve been assured, and underway now.
Some time ago, Jed Connelly, the articulate
leader of Nissan, was promoted, and the new general manager of the Nissan
Division for Nissan North America was announced would be Robert
“Brad” Bradshaw.
A long time Nissanite, Brad has been with
the Nissan in various capacities and titles, including: president of Nissan
He’s been with the company since 1983
– a tenure of 23 years with Nissan. While it may not be a longevity
record, it does point to career durability, endurance and stability in an
industry that has experienced recent seismographic level tremors in
executive personnel changes.
As a prelude to Brad assuming his new position
on
MB: First of all, congratulations
on your promotion. It’s both exciting and
challenging, isn’t it?
BB: Thank you … and yes, it
is exciting and it is good timing with all the new products we have coming
out.
MB: I’d be remiss if I
didn’t ask about the move to
BB: The most important part for
us to focus on is the ultimate customer. From their perspective there
should not be any impact with the relocation of the headquarters.
MB: What about the impact on your
dealers?
BB: And the same thing holds true
for our dealers – no impact at all. There are
seven regions in Nissan and three in the Infiniti division. We are
approaching it as if “nothing” is going on. I believe we will
be able to pull this off effortlessly because there are no changes in the
regions, just in headquarters with the change in geographic
location.
MB: Will the change in venue,
coupled with new employees replacing those who wanted to remain in
BB: The biggest risk, if you can
call it that, is not the long term product plan because that’s pretty
well set. It’s the marketing plan and launch for the products
we’re introducing this year.
MB: Speaking with some of your
fellow executives recently I learned every person slated to relocate was
spoken to by not just one, but several management types. Is this correct?
BB: After all, there are only
1300 people and it may sound like a lot of people, but that’s what
the business is all about: interaction. When we knew
someone was on the fence about relocation, we made the best effort to keep
them. The way we approached the relocation was we wanted everyone to go
with us, if at all possible.
MB: Let’s talk product.
What new vehicles are being launched and what were the
concerns?
BB: There are five for Nissan and
one for Infiniti. We’ve tried to shore up the teams surrounding the
products we are launching. Where we knew someone was
not going to make the trip with us, we did parallel hiring to make sure we
not only covered areas where the people did not choose to move, but areas
of critical knowledge too. And we started with the priority of those
products we are launching.
MB: What are the five vehicles
Nissan is launching this year?
BB: All new vehicles include the
Versa, Sentra and the Ultima. The face-lifts are the Quest and Maxima. We
are starting this summer and will continue through the fall until the end
of the calendar year.
MB: Five launches in six months,
that’s a lot of work.
BB: It’s going to be a head
spinning time for all of us at Nissan.
MB: What new advertising and
marketing is planned for the new cars? And the question I hate, but must
ask, how much will you spend?
BB: Obviously, with that kind of
volume of new car launches, we are going to have more marketing activity
this year than we would in any other year. The approach to the mediums we
are using is going to change a bit.
MB: Can you offer a couple
examples?
BB: For Versa we’re
appealing to a younger buyer who doesn’t use the same kind of
traditional mediums to get their information as do a lot of buyers in the
Ultima segment. So, we have had to diversify our approach and use different
mediums. The media mix actually changes for each of the new models.
MB: The Nissan Shift tag line has been changed, hasn’t it?
BB: We have hung with the tag
line for a long time. It’s a good mechanism for us to link together a
lot of the things we are doing in the company. We have found it to be
amazingly flexible.
MB: Are you using more new
mediums, especially the Internet?
BB: We’ve spent a lot of
time in the last year or so to first, improve the website itself – to
reduce the number of clicks that people have to go through to get to what
it is they are after, simplify the whole thing. But then also to attach
some tracking mechanisms that give us information and ideas, not just how
many people have used the site, but what they’re doing while on the
site and then tracking them all the way to the sale at our
dealers.
MB: That’s a major shift in
the media paradigm, isn’t it? Running TV and hoping something’s
going to happen as opposed to knowing what has happened?
BB: It is a much more trackable
environment. When we get someone to come onto the website and give us their
information, we can figure out if and when they buy!
We can’t do that with a television commercial where one is
passively sitting on the sofa.
MB: How does the Nissan Internet
system function?
BB: We pass the leads along to
the dealers and then follow-up with consumer surveys that go out on a
random basis to learn how soon the dealers have followed up on the leads.
MB: One brand I’m aware of
has a 48-hour rule: if the dealer does not follow-up on an Internet lead in
48 hours, the lead goes to another dealer.
BB: I’ve heard about that
tactic, but we don’t use it. That said, we do follow-up with the
dealers on the leads to make sure they are being followed-up on. And then,
show them the difference in sales rate between the follow-up times –
if you follow-up in X hours, how the closing rate is much higher than if
you wait a couple of days.
MB: Are Nissan dealers moving to
the more effective Internet tools versus the degradation of and influence
of newspaper classified advertising?
BB: I believe it’s an
educational process. Most of the dealers we talk to about it are extremely
interested in it, but like us when we first got into it we were a little
naļve in terms of what it takes to be successful on the Internet. Our
dealers are thirsty for knowledge. We had a technology group of our
dealers. They told us that we’ve got to get the stuff out there and
help them understand what it is they need to do to maximize the number of
leads coming to our site and theirs.
MB: More and more dealers are
using eBay and the Internet to move used vehicles, do you think this will
continue? And what’s the future for the Internet for dealers?
BB: We have some dealers who are
amazingly advanced in this area. So, it’s not as though the whole
group is not participating. There are some leading edge dealers out there,
some of them in our camp who are doing a great job with the Internet and
for the most part are willing to share some of their knowledge. But there
are some with a proprietary nature, not wanting to give away the
store.
MB: What was your first
car?
BB: The first car I ever owned
was a 1963 Corvette, which I had to push across the yard from our
neighbor’s yard because the gas tank had a leak in it. I did a lot of
work on the car myself. Then, I had a