Paolo Gagliardo used to scuba dive, a way of taking time out into an environment where he was a guest rather than in charge. And at the very least, it’s probably the only environment left where the mobile phone doesn’t intrude. All you have to worry about are the sharks.
But Fiat Auto Ireland’s new CEO doesn’t have much time for such escape these days. Not that he’s complaining - part of the reason is the ‘hectic’ time he’s enjoying with his young family just now.
The other part, more of which we in Ireland will be seeing soon, is a car that quite bluntly will decide whether the Fiat brand ever gets back into being a major player in the C-segment, or remains as the biggest small-car producer in Europe.
Stilo. There’s something tough about the name, which is a decent start. There’s backbone in it. And having seen the cars in the metal some months ago, I’m impressed with what’s coming our way in time for the buying months of 2002.
But Paolo Gagliardo and his team at Fiat House in Dublin have to do more than provide a good product. They have to sell it, and sell Fiat even harder against an Irish public’s dogged perception that its cars are not as good as they should be. That’s a perception that should be long since gone, but we seem to have the rusty 70s embedded in folk memory.
Punto, of course, has kept Fiat alive here, even regenerated it, albeit only in the B-segment. Gagliardo reckons Stilo is strong enough to do the same in the small family car category.
“I believe a brand can be turned around,” he says. “VW did it, coming from a one-car company to one which has highly respected models in every segment. They did it with Audi, which they took over as a pile of rubble. And they did it with Skoda most recently. We can do it with Stilo. I want to beat this perception, and if I have the numbers I can do it.”
That’s a confident attitude, one which has developed relatively recently right through the Fiat company. Gagliardo makes no bones about the fact that he wants Stilo to be the ‘protagonist’ which Fiat has not been able to produce in the segment for too long now.
“We’re like a chair with two legs, and I think we’ve been brilliant to get the market share we have now in Ireland with just A and B segment leaders. Now we’re going to add the third leg, and get on the shopping list of people who wouldn’t have put Fiat on it before.”
Gagliardo is remaining coy about the strategy he’ll use here, holding his powder dry until the car launches in Ireland at the end of December. But he promises a campaign that ‘will animate the market’, that will be ‘obsessive’ about getting across the good messages about Stilo.
“I want to be very aggressive. Our mix of product, price, distribution and advertising will make us leaders. We have our product, we have our homework done, the price will be fine and we will achieve our objectives and change people’s minds about Fiat.”
But after the artillery barrages and air strikes in any battle, it is the foot-soldiers who have to get in close and dirty. And in this case, the foot-soldiers are the dealers. In the global context, Fiat took the unusual step of bringing all their dealers to Milan for an empowering conference earlier this year, and Gagliardo reckons his Irish frontliners will be well up to their task.
“We gave them the solution to the global threats to Fiat, a solution firmly rooted in the product and supported on a strategy of marketing, advertising, customer service and after sales. You will see changes in Fiat dealerships over coming months, new premises, lots of improvements in existing showrooms.”
Fiat Ireland’s new CEO doesn’t want to change the ‘family’ orientation of most of its dealers here, because he personally applauds people who commit with their own lives in what they do. But he will promote the new Fiat strategy of ‘enlarging their business structure’.
“We want our dealers to think more strategically about their business, and it’s my job to enable them to do this. There are business opportunities centred around the car, which are not just the sales of cars themselves, and we want them to be able to take these opportunities. And we want an improvement in customer service, because the quality and the mix of products they will be selling is much different than it used to be.”
From the most recent news in the Irish economy, it will also be in a somewhat different climate than Irish dealers have become used to over the last five years. Gagliardo is fairly sanguine about the prospects even though he’s only here a couple of months.
“The economy is still growing, and the European economy generally is getting a bit stronger. The Irish growth rate was very high and is slowing, but by the time the other European economies catch up, Ireland will be doing just fine. It may be that there is not as strong a ‘purchasing intention’ because of an increased anxiety, but as long as we don’t make too many self-fulfilling prophecies of doom, I believe everybody will still be selling cars in the coming years.”
In fact, he suggests the car market in those coming years will be a ‘better’ one because it won’t have dramatic peaks where dealers have to stretch themselves beyond the limits of customer satisfaction. “I much prefer a steadier trend which allows things to get more robust.”
But back to Stilo, which will be the really big test of both Fiat globally and Gagliardo in Ireland. He’s not coming to the fray inexperienced, as he was in a previous career segment the Marketing Manager for Ford, Italy and Brand Manager for Ford Mustang in Dearborn, Michigan.
He knows his competition intimately. Which was why he was until his Irish appointment the European Stilo Launch team leader. And which, if he’s given the product and the pricing to do it in Ireland, he’ll be the contender he wants to be.
September 2001
by Brian Byrne