Volvo Marketing Strategy

Marketing Assignment – Group 4
Volvo the Brand
The concept of branding is a controversial subject explored by marketers from different perspectives. De Chematony & Dall’Olmo (1998) studied different literal definitions from over hundred academic articles and classified them in a brand construct model consisting of 12 key interpretations: legal, logo, company, shorthand, risk reducer, identity system, image, value system, and personality, relationship, adding value, and evolving entity. These elements are interconnected and should be carefully measured when building & managing brands.
Volvo the brand has strong heritage in car industry and succeeded to define its core values and direction. It has probably failed to connect with some aspects

The concentration on Safety as a core value diluted the importance other key characteristics in car industry. Contrarily, most people associate Volvo with dull style, old inactive generation and slightly high priced cars; while the aim was to attract responsible business executive with secured income and taste for safety. This crisis in identity coupled with modest advertising severely damaged brand awareness and therefore brand equity in the past decade. The Chinese Group Geely acquired the brand in 2010 for a value of $1.8 billion versus $6 billion when Ford first bought it in 2000.
Volvo, the Brand Personality
The Brand Personality is the “set of human characteristics associated with a brand” (Aaker J, 1997). Without this symbolic association, brands struggle to add value to customers; a brand is preferred than another because it relates to the buyer and reflect personality. Volvo Brand relates to the progressive insightful, to the responsible human, environmentalist, liberal and sociocritical.
We will examine Volvo personality via Aeker five factors Brand personality construct to define the elements in personality of a

This combined with pledge to safety is been endorsed by its special decentralized quality management and council. Volvo cleverly enforced environmental care as a key element in its branding strategy; it developed proactive environmental implemented programs to strengthen its competitive advantage while contributing positively to saving planet earth.
Actually, Volvo mastered this exercise and endorsed each value with facts in its products, way of working, and communication. However, Volvo needs to broaden the scope of its identity as quality and safety are no longer the anchors of excellence in the car industry. Customers’ needs are changing and Volvo is required to adopt a strategic approach to avoid the brand traps and maximize its competitive position.
The Product Mix:
“A product is any offering that can satisfy a need or want” (Kotler,1999) . It has 3 elements: Core, Actual and Augmented as seen in below figure (John Fahy and David Jobber,