Mazda boss wants to learn from Australia

MAZDA Australia has been so successful at winning and retaining customers that the company’s second most senior executive globally wants to see for himself how it has been achieved and how it might be applied to other regions.

Australia is Mazda’s fifth-largest market in the world (behind only the US, Japan, Canada and China) and its 22.1 per cent growth last year was one of the best for a mature market.

The company’s success in Australia goes back decades and is founded on strong customer loyalty.

Mazda Motor Corporation executive vice-president Robert Graziano, who is in Australia for the national media launch of the new Mazda6, said there is international interest in what Australia has achieved.

“Australia is one of the leaders in quality of service and customer satisfaction within the Mazda global community and I’m actually here to learn more about how they’ve achieved this,” Mr Graziano told GoAuto.

“I’m keenly interested in discussing with Doug (Dickson – Mazda Australia managing director) his future plans for improvement to help apply this to other regions.

Left: Taiki concept car is understood to contain design elements for a future RX-7.



“It is a well-run organisation down here. I believe they have done a tremendous job continuing to build the brand. If you look at the growth they’ve had in the last five or six years, they’ve remained focused on the brand, they’ve remained focused on the customer and I think it’s paying dividends in terms of their growth.

“I’m keen to understand, with a bit more detail, how they’re doing that. It’s really more of an education for me. It’s an opportunity for me to learn.

“It will certainly afford me to ask questions in other markets where they may or may not be doing things that Australia has done. I can ask them, ‘Have you thought about this?’ or ‘Have you talked to Doug in Australia and seen how he runs his CRM (Customer Relationship Management) initiatives?’ – just as I would tell Doug about things that are going on in the US or Europe or Japan.”

Mr Dickson this year celebrates 30 years with Mazda in Australia. Four years ago he succeeded long-running managing director Malcolm Gough – who left to join the Mazda board in Japan – having been national sales manager since 1987.

He has overseen Mazda’s remarkable growth, trebling sales since 2000, and credits his dealer network for the company’s success.

“A lot of them have been with us over what I might say were the bad times in the late-1990s and we’ve learnt together to look after our customers because we didn’t have too many of them, so those that stayed with us over that period developed a very single-minded focus on the customer,” said Mr Dickson.

“We have a very private-market focus and that has done very well for us in terms of customer loyalty. We’ve been doing this for some time so part of our culture is that we do focus on our customers and we look after them well.

“Our group of dealers are very resilient and are able to step up to the mark. We’ve asked them to do certain things and they’re responded – they’ve done the training, they’ve put on the people, they’ve done the facilities.

“Some people say there is one group of people that look after sales and another group over here who will catch up the problems, but the people who make the sales actually have to worry about the customer service – you can’t do it in isolation.”

Mum's the word on RX-7

IF MAZDA is planning to build a new-generation RX-7 high-performance sportscar –as many pundits expect following recent unveilings of the Taiki concept car powered by a bigger, more powerful rotary engine – then Robert Graziano is not letting on.

Under intense questioning from Australian journalists this week, Mazda’s global vice-president would only give commitments to ongoing rotary production and to the four-door RX-8.

“Everybody’s telling me that they’d like to see an RX-7,” Mr Graziano admitted. “(But) at this point what we’re looking at is continuing with RX-8 and that’s where we are with the whole sportscar theme in terms of what we can talk about with future products. The RX-8 is going to be with us for quite some time.”

Most long-term Mazda designers and engineers are happy to talk about the importance of the RX-7 to Mazda and would love for it to return – especially Mazda2 designer Ikuo Maeda, whose father designed the original RX-7.

There is widespread speculation globally that such a program has been approved and that the new RX-7 – possibly called RX-9 – will be launched in 2012. But no-one at Mazda, least of all Bob Graziano, is prepared to spill the beans…

Read more:

First look: Mazda Taiki set to debut at Tokyo

Designer’s RX-heaven