DS success a decade away

It will take another decade for the French PSA group’s DS luxury brand to establish itself in the global automotive market.

That’s the prediction of the five-year-old brand’s global CEO, Yves Bonnefont, who has the task of spreading DS’s French luxury message.

“We believe it takes two product cycles to create a brand,” Bonnefont told motoring.com.au. “So two product cycles in the automotive industry is about 15 years.

“So it’s not something you do overnight.”

DS, which launched its first model in 2010, is progressively untethering itself from the Citroen mothership and embarking on its own product development program.

It will commence its second round of new model launches from 2017, planning to launch five new vehicles in three years.

DS is well established in China and has a strengthening presence in Europe. Bonnefont says the brand plans to double the current 100 DS stores over the next few years.

There are also plans to take on Australia more seriously than at the current limited sales level, but Bonnefont warned that it was not a high priority until the next generation of products arrive.

For the moment there will no stand alone stores here, instead DS will get separate space within Citroen dealerships.

Currently, the DS 3, DS 4 and DS 5 are sold in Australia. The DS 5 has just been launched in updated form, while the facelifted DS 4 gets here in 2016, including the new high-rise Crossback version. An updated DS 3 will also go on sale in 2016.

“Australia is definitely on the radar screen,” Bonnefont said. “I can’t share any dates, but it is important that we get to Australia with the product that the customer likes.

“We sell a few DS in Australia at the moment … it’s a very limited number. We believe the Crossback will be of interest to Australian customers so we will see how that car will do in the market.

“Then as we get into our future product range we will continue to come with larger cars which I think will fit with the Australian market.”

Bonnefont said DS had four key parameters it wanted to project to the world’s luxury car buyers as it sought to establish itself.

Each car was intended to combine avante-garde design, a high level of refinement and material quality reflecting French craftsmanship, advanced and seamless technology and a combination of dynamism and comfort, in the spirit the revolutionary 1955 Citroen DS, albeit without hydro-pneumatic suspension.

“So if you put those four things together, the core purpose of the brand is to embed the luxury know-how of France into the car industry and make sure we have a French brand that is high-end and is luxury in the car industry,” said Bonnefont.

But he cautioned the 10-year estimate to establish the brand’s credentials was dependant on executing those four parameters correctly.

“It is extremely important that each and every car we release in the market can spell this out loud and clear with every specific attribute and that may be communicated to the market, so the customers can understand what our brand stands for,” he said.

The move by DS away from Citroen has been emphasised by most models now shedding the famous chevron badge from their sheetmetal. And while DS will share the same core architectures with Citroen and the third PSA member, Peugeot, the launch cadence of the three model lines will be separate.

So that means a C3 won’t be closely followed by a DS 3, a C4 by a DS 4 and so on.

“The product cycles of Citroen and DS are now totally disconnected,” insisted Bonnefont. “We have our own product plan, Citroen has its own product plan and Peugeot has its own product plan. The group has three plans and they are different.

“One of the core missions of the brand is to define the product plan, so for DS we have defined the target product range made of six cars and they will be rolled out.

“We are starting to move to the direction we want to go and we will have a product push starting in 2017 when we will launch five cars in three years.”

Bonnefont rejected the suggestion that continuing to use the same numeral as the equivalent Citroen model only encouraged the perception DS was still sub-brand rather than stand alone.

“There is a general understanding of the market that the bigger the number the bigger the car so this is not a Citroen thing,” he insisted. “Citroen has C3, C4, C5 but Audi has A3, A4, A5 and so on. I don’t think it is a Citroen pattern, I think it is an industry pattern.