The launching ceremony of "Geely GX7's Coastline Tour and Survey on Chinese Small and Micro Enterprises' Survival and Development" was held in Dongxing, Guangxi Province on October 12. On the departure ceremony of the GX7, Sun Xiaodong, Vice President of Geely Group and General Manager of its sales company, was interviewed by reporters from people.com.cn.
Sun once served as Vice President of General Motors. In September 2012, he joined Geely Holding Group, acting as Geely's Vice President and member of the Economic Management Committee, responsible for the construction and management of the group's brand, market and product strategy planning system and in charge of its strategic marketing department. Since May 2013, Sun has being serving as General Manager of Geely's sales company.
As for the current development of Geely Automobile, Sun said, "Geely Automobile is undergoing some changes". He remarked that Geely was considering problems relating to enterprise strategy, including product, band and channel strategies. "The Coastline Tour can reflect the current state of Geely. For example, it has started to organize activities of high cost, large scale, long time span and big impact as well as activities using three-dimensional transmission," he said.
As for the marketing system, Geely has realized "vertical to horizontal" transformation. The business units of Englon, Emgrand and Gleagle have become main sales regions and Geely plans to add another two this year. The original intention of adjusting business units was to help market management personnel stay at the front of the market, to flatten the entire organization, and to let those who are at the front of the market make decisions, Sun explained to the reporter. He also indicated that compared with other enterprises, Geely was more open in management and many business units had their own decision-making power. With the improvement Geely had made in many aspects, the advantages of adjusting business units would be reflected gradually. "It takes time to prove many market reforms", said Sun.
As for the dealer channel, according to Sun's introduction, now Geely's channel construction mainly focuses on improving its channel quality, channel ability and the rationality of channel distribution. Sun noted that channel strategy was an essential part in all Geely's brand strategies. Geely considered every dealer as its business partner and endeavored to lay solid foundation of channels. Only with solid foundation can further optimization work be conducted smoothly, the enterprise develop fast and the development be strong.
As for the brand, Geely's core brand philosophy has always been obscure to the industry and consumers. And on this, Sun indicated that Geely was working on designing its core brand concept which needs to suit Geely's features, differ from the concept of competitors, but match consumers' values. "From the perspective of products, we hope concept designers can know consumer's values precisely and let consumers have a clear understanding of Geely Automobile by reading the core concept", Sun said.
As for the product, Sun indicated that Geely's products are sure to light up people's eyes in future and make users more confident in its products and self-owned brands. He emphasized that the theme for "Geely GX7's Coastline Tour" was defined as "bright prospects". Meanwhile, he thought that the self-owned brands, represented by Geely Automobile, are sure to have "bright prospects" and owners of the GX7 and other Geely products would have "bright prospects" as well.