Answer

Bentley’s Frankfurt Motor Show

Bentley Motors, founded by W.O. Bentley, is a London based company renowned for designing, developing, and manufacturing some of the world’s most luxurious hand-built motorcars.  Bentley Motors aim is to create cars that are luxurious and performative. In recent year, Bentley created a variety of cars including Mulanne, Flying Spur, and Continental. These cars can be chosen to be saloon or coupe. The distinct features of these cars are that they are all comfortable, with high performance specification. Nevertheless, Bentley has a high starting up price. For Instance, a continental base price would be £16000 and no options are included (Zhang 2015). This means that Bentley motors, has targeted Businessman or Higher Class as their market segment.

However, this year Bentley had a new marketing event. In Frankfurt motor show, Bentley was revealing their new model; Bentayga. It is a brand new concept from Bentley. Bentley used to make saloon or coupe cars. This year Bentley has made a Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) (Taylor 2015). Undoubtedly, Bentley has entered a new market sector. However, this means that Bentley will be facing a lot of challenges. For example, how Bentley can draw the market attention in order to increase sales and what promotion campaign should they be using.

The largest market rival for Bentley will be Land Rover, the market leader of SUV market. Bentley claims that its Bentayga SUV is the most powerful, fastest and arguably most luxurious SUV on the market, but Land Rover has a historical, well-known reputation of SUV car maker. This is a highly competitive market segment with dominant giants such as the Land Rover Range Rover. At the end, will consumer choose Land rover or Bentayga? That will only depend on consumer preferences. However, consumer references as we know can always be influenced through a cleverly crafted robust marketing strategy.

As such, the success of the Bentley Bentayga will largely depend on their marketing capability. So far, the company seems to have recognized that and has been working on the same. Their marketing strategy is driven by a catchy brand positioning statement “The world is full of extraordinary places. Bentayga has been designed to take you to them” (Bentley Motors 2015). This offers customers the promise of a wide array of options and experiences that have been unavailable in SUV. The new Bentley Bentayga SUV is said to display unprecedented power, efficiency, and speed. It is a set pacer in the SUV sector.

Bentley Bentayga

(Taylor 2015)

The marketing team was particularly very creative in their Frankfurt motor show when they revealed the new model. That was followed by the release of a video showing the outstanding testing of the Bentyga SUV under hot weather conditions. Mr. Wolfgang Durheimer, the Chairman and CEO of the company comments that the name Bentyga reflect the fact that the SUV will do better than others in the market by combining the best automotive luxury with an outstanding luxury (Taylor 2015). These features are designed at influencing the high-end customer preferences to take a share of the Mercedes and Land Rover market shares.

The Bentayga in a bid to influence customer preferences has designed superior features that make it an outstanding SUV. The early stages of a product development hinge largely on the understanding of the potential customer needs (Ots & Nyilasy 2015: 134). This helps the firm to optimally position a product constituting a portfolio to perform well on such metrics as revenue or contribution margin in a competitive space (Eid, Elbeltagi, & Zairi 2015: 187). It is a seven-seater with a lavish interior powered by a monstrous W12 engine. It is the world’s fastest SUV with a speed of 187mph.

The product offerings where the development window is large as is the case in the automotive, it is certain that customer preferences would have evolved during the 36-48 month concept-to-release period (Luxton, Reid, & Mavondo, 2015: 39). As such, a vehicle portfolio that is designed based on past customer preferences is likely to be suboptimal relative to future market shares. This calls for capturing of the dynamics of customer preferences that arise (Kitchen & Proctor 2015: 34). For instance, in the case of Bentayga, the original EXP concept of 2012 has undergone numerous changes with only some of the design surviving the transition to production (Taylor 2015). The model that was launched was a five-seater but another model with three rows of seats will be available soon. What have been put through extreme tests are its prototypes and the final design has not yet been revealed.

Another aspect of customer preference is the willingness-to-pay (WTP) index. This is the maximum monetary amount consumers are willing to pay for a good product. The company luxurious cars are for the wealthy (Mattson & Basu 2015: 275). Perhaps the most evident statement proofing this is the suggestion that the first Bentayga will be owned by Queen Elizabeth. Mr. Durheimer says that they are building 3,600 vehicles in the first year and the demand is well above that (Taylor 2015). Other prospective buyers will have to wait much longer to get their hands on the new model. This indicates the level of WTP among customers for the new SUV model. Many customers are willing to pay very high amounts for the car even before they have seen the final model. This implies that customer preference for the Bentayga is extremely high.

The key players in the production of Bentayga are Volkswagen that is supplying the turbocharged W12 engine. The technical expertise was involved in the designing, development, and manufacturing of the new model. The marketing team was also involved in market analysis, design, and marketing campaign. Moreover, Mr. Wolfgang Durheimer provided the vision and motivation required to achieve the new development.

The Bentayga marketing event offers an excellent case study for an effective marketing strategy. Bentayga’s marketing event was the climax of a series of events involving pre-launch and post-launch marketing efforts for the new model. One key element in the Bentley’s marketing event is the clear understanding of their competitors and clients. The company was able to identify their clients and a clear insight into their needs in relation to existing models in the market. It is also driven by a visionary brand positioning statement. More importantly the company was able to effectively embrace the vast opportunities offered by the advent of online platforms in their marketing campaign. Their Frankfurt motor show launching event is now available on YouTube. Their website also presents the outstanding models and features of the new SUV including its crafty interiors, testing experiences in extreme conditions, and potential models. By and large, the marketing event is a good example of what constitutes an effective marketing campaign for new product launch. As such, it can be used in the marketing course or in marketing textbooks as a case study.