Holden says it's 'here to stay'

Following Holden's announcement that it will stop making cars in Australia after 2017, there's been strong concern about what would happen to the badge, with the big question being whether it would continue in Australia or be replaced by Chevrolet.

Holden has responded with a new ad campaign titled Here To Stay, which doesn't shy away from the shutdown decision that will see about 2900 jobs go in Victoria's Port Melbourne and South Australia's Elizabeth plants. However the campaign aims to send a message to Australia that there is more to Holden than the factory floors, and there will be more imported cars to come wearing the Holden brand.

But while the campaign has appeared very quickly, it wasn't part of the initial shutdown planning, Holden's executive director of vehicle sales, service and marketing, Philip Brook, says. "When we were notified of the shutdown decision this wasn't on the list of things we were planning to do," he says. "But what became apparent over the first three or four days was that there was a lot of misinformation out there -- there were some sensationalist headlines about 'Holden's gone and we're leaving the country altogether'.

"That was the impression people were getting ... and there were a couple of articles that were just plain wrong around us walking away from the Holden brand and using Chevrolet, and people has said we'd studied that -- absolutely categorically incorrect. And that we were bringing Commodores in from China -- again absolutely incorrect."

Brook says the aim of the campaign is to make sure the public knew what Holden is planning for the future. "We wanted to get out and really clear things up with the public and make sure they understood that the Holden brand has been around for 100 years and we plan to be around for a very long time to come," he says.

"We just wanted to clear up the confusion, so it's really to let all of Australia understand we're here, and we've got a massive job to do -- we've got hundreds of thousands of cars and engines to build in the next four years.And we plan to continue selling Holdens well into the future, because it's two car lines that we build here in Australia but the rest of our model range is imported and we're going to transition to a fully imported model range."

Brook says the campaign was also aimed at supporting the brand's own dealer network. "We've also got more than 230 dealers and thousands and thousands of staff that are employed by those dealers and massive investments that they've made over the years in Holden. And really what we wanted to do was support them as well, so this campaign is just about clearing things up."

He says the creative approach for the campaign, and its launch, were both achieved with astonishing speed -- and largely sparked by the response from friends of people at Holden HQ. "We basically made the announcement about manufacturing on Tuesday and briefed the agency -- AJF in Melbourne who do all our ad creative work -- on the Thursday and they turned around the concept overnight.

"Normally  a campaign like this would take us months and we turned it around in a week so we're very happy with the work that's been done in a such period of time. But it was just a simple message, nothing more and nothing less than 'we've been around for a long time and we're going to be around for a long, long time in the future'.

"We made the announcement about shutting down manufacturing and then gave it 48 hours to gauge the reaction -- and a lot of us had friends and acquaintances ringing and texting and asking if Holden was finishing, based on the headlines and some of the articles they were seeing. So we wanted to clear that up and get the message out there."

And while many businesses would have skirted any bad news in their next campaign following such an announcement, Holden has been very up front about mentioning the shutdown in the commercial.

"That's part of the Holden brand and being Australian. We've always been honest in our advertising," Brook says. "That's the way we do things -- it's part of our DNA -- that how we've always done things and that's how we'll continue to do things."

However, despite the new commercial being panned by social media, and following on from a previous ad campaign based around the 'Think Holden' tagline, Brook says the new commercial is not part of the first steps to have Australia 'rethink Holden' as a full importer.
   
"This isn't the start of the repositioning," he says. "We've got a number of years yet with the brand and similar sort of products. We've got plenty of time to work through that. This was really just a short sharp campaign and once we get the message out there we'll move on and get back to the main job -- selling cars."