Haygarth OKs CRM for Kia

Marketing firm Haygarth has created a customer loyalty program for the British automobile brand Kia which seeks to communicate with customers at key stages in the consumer process. As Haygarth associate director Tom Charles rationalized, “integrating the CRM and customer acquisition activity is an important step in ensuring that Kia has seamless consumer communication.”

Along with the announcement was a display of the new Kia welcome pack with a guide to alternative motorway food stops, a mailing with a first-birthday card for the car (!), as well as upgrade mailings. Prior to the launch of the CRM programme, Haygarth produced a qualification mailing designed to clean the database and request information on customers’ replacement intentions; company figures showed that the mailing achieved a 27 percent response rate, which company reps called a success.

Haygarth was contracted to handle Kia’s £1 million direct marketing account in March 2006, and is reportedly the car company’s first below-the-line agency, with most of its previous promotional activity created by above-the-line agency, Mustoes. Kia Motors Corporation was founded in Korea in 1944 and first came to the United Kingdom in 1991; since this time, the firm has concentrated efforts in European expansion.