Corporate identity
JB: In terms of your brand and branding, you have Bristol Street, Macklin, and Vertu. What dictates what name is
attributed to which?
RF: Scotland is Macklin and Bristol Street is England and the only time the word Vertu is used is with Honda.
JB: Why is Honda different?
RF: We didn’t think Bristol Street Motors would add anything to our Honda business. Our Honda business is a very high performing business, a part of the community in Lincolnshire (Vertu acquired Grantham Motor Company in 2007 with five Honda dealerships) and we needed to play the hearts and minds game; we needed the colleagues to make sure that they felt nothing much was changing and actually nothing much needed to change in our business and therefore we left it at Lincolnshire Honda.
But when we grew with the brand in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire we had to change and it became Vertu Honda. But it’s a very soft branding. It’s very much Mansfield Honda, Doncaster Honda.
JB: What do you think people identify with? Firstly, your staff – do they identify with what they had before?
RF: No, they’re quite comfortable with Vertu Honda.
JB: And the customers?
RF: The customers would probably identify with the dealership, the town name and the manufacturer brand.
JB: Finally, what’s the strategy with your used cars? You had three Motor Nation used car centres, and now you’ve got one, one has become a Honda centre. It looks like a reversal of strategy.
RF: It wasn’t really a reversal. We had the opportunity to get a couple of great dealerships in good towns, in great locations where we didn’t have a franchise to put in. So, for an undefined time period we knew we would be able to build up a great used car operation to start with and eventually put in a franchise, which is exactly what happened.
Consider Darlington Nissan. Darlington Nissan started in February 2011, but we opened it as a Motor Nation site in about 2008/9. We’ve still got our Motor Nation used car business although it’s now called the Darlington Nissan used car business. It was actually always part of our strategy when we opened the Motor Nation brand that they would become franchised at some point. And I don’t believe customers would notice the name change.
The site in Darlington opened as Bristol Street Motor Nation and we offered the same kind of services you would in a franchised dealer and the only difference to the customer is that new cars are on sale there.
JB: The Motor Nation strategy of acquiring a location with potential first and putting a franchise in it at some point
will continue?
RF: If we need to. The strategy had a bit of a time and place element to it; it was when everybody else was closing lots of dealerships and lots of sites were becoming available.
Jeremy has been a journalist for 30 years, 20 of which have been in business-to-business automotive. He was a writer and news editor on AM-sister brand Fleet News for three years before setting up the AM website. For the last five years he has been Bauer B2B’s head of digital helping to manage the digital assets of AM, together with Fleet News, Commercial Fleet, Rail and Smart Transport.
Wish to remain anonymous - 30/01/2013 11:34
Hi, I am a shareholder in Vertu who after 5 years is back to where I started in terms of share price. I think there is excellent leadership through Mr Forrester, but I only hope he and Vertu remember to focus on long term profitability. I worry some of the acquisitions may be costly and I do hope consolidation will lead in time to a 2% (or even higher)margin. I remain a committed shareholder, thank Mr Forrester and his staff for their work, but ask that long term return to shareholders be at the forefront of what Vertu aims to achieve.