- Lisa Brankin Ford Marketing Director on new SME focus
- How Vignale offers SMEs upmarket business motoring
- New Active to open up brand further to SMEs
- Daily rental reduced
FORD is cutting back on its daily rental business with its all new Focus.
The company says it is looking to capture more discerning buyers with upscale Vignale and Active crossover models
Marketing Director Lisa Brankin said: “Traditionally the high spec Focus models have sold best and now we are giving it a distinct Vignale branding that brings much high specification levels and improved residual values. We will be reducing our daily rental sales down by 23% and we will be looking to appeal more to small businesses and user choosers.”
The Vignale brand is starting to gain traction since the launch of the Fiesta version earlier this year, although Brankin admitted that the Mondeo luxury model struggles to compete with the likes of BMW, Audi and Mercedes Benz.
Brankin added: “The D segment has been diminishing year after year and buyers do tend towards the German premiums, but the Fiesta Vignale has proved very popular and we have high hopes for Focus.
“Our aim is to get the message across that this is a very highly specced car while other models in the range introduce a lot of new technologies. This presents its own problems when it comes to explaining everything at dealer handover, but we find that people tend to work out pretty quickly what’s relevant to them. We are also making video content available on YouTube so that customers can increase their knowledge of the systems at a later date.”
For a review of the latest Ford Focus Vignale models click here
