Narrower Focus

Beth Donovan is the new Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Ford Australia. Ms Donovan, already a 'known quantity' to her boss here, Bill Osborne, will fill the role recently vacated by Mark Winslow following Winslow's promotion.

Osborne says that Donovan's selection was not "a rifle-shot", meaning she was carefully chosen for the role.

She steps down from her position of Director, Product Marketing, Small Cars with Ford in the US, to take up the local position. Osborne, who describes Donovan as "an excellent person for dealer relations", has confirmed that she will be officially starting from September 1. She "emerged as the first selection" and was previously known to Osborne when he was working in trucks and she was in SUV product marketing.

As if it isn't hard enough becoming acclimatised to a new working environment, Donovan will need to hit the ground running when she arrives, learning rapidly about the country and the culture -- especially as it applies to Ford motor vehicles.

It's likely that her first major task on arrival here will involve revamping the marketing strategy for the Focus model range. As she comes from a small-car background -- and that's where Osborne sees her excelling -- she'll be in a position to shape the marketing strategy as it applies to the Focus, a vehicle that will eventually be locally manufactured here.

In the meantime, Osborne sees the imported Focus, which is due for a 'refresh' next year, as being in need of some serious attention. As reported previously, the Focus has not been achieving the sales that Ford anticipated (more here).

"We've got a lot of complexity in the [Focus] line-up," says Osborne. "We haven't had what I would call a 'focus' on a high-volume model.

"When you have this kind of complexity, it tends to create stock problems around the country, because every dealer orders something different. There's no alignment on the advertising. There are a lot of issues created with complexity.

"The other problem for us is Focus has a lot of 'Euro exposure' -- and when the Euro continues to strengthen and the Aussie dollar doesn't keep up, it creates margin pressure for us.

"It's very difficult for us to be competitive -- and that's a reason why we made what I think is a pretty courageous decision to manufacture a small car here in Australia. That 'Euro exposure' is definitely an issue for us.

"Frankly, if you look at Focus in private versus non-private, we do fairly well on the private side, but because of those margin pressures, we are not nearly competitive on the fleet side of the business.

"We're yet to find the right recipe to break out of the pack... so we're going to try a few different things.

"One of the things we think is going to be important is perhaps to highlight a more attractive vehicle in our offers. Right now we're at $20,490 driveaway -- but it's on a CL model, an entry-level model. We think it's worth trying a more attractive model.

"We're looking at some special value packs... but I think in terms of driving more volumes, we've got to narrow our model range and get a higher-volume, more attractive vehicle -- perhaps at a higher price.

"What we see happening in the marketplace, is customers not only moving down -- into small cars -- but they're taking their large-car expectations with them.

Osborne points to six Focus CL variants -- versus "three or four" in competitors' model ranges -- to illustrate this inherent complexity in Ford's small-car model range.

So when Donovan arrives, she will already have her very own cause celebre -- one called 'Focus'.

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