automotive

Hyundai Drops U.S. Site In Global Move

Hyundai homepage Hyundai Motor America's official U.S. Web site, HyundaiUSA.com, is transitioning to a global domain, www.Hyundai.com. The company says the change will create a single brand identity and make its global Internet operation more efficient.

Hyundai plans to issue a global guideline for all its subsidiaries and distributors worldwide in order to unify the look and feel of all of its sites. The change includes an advanced geo-targeting technology that automatically identifies and displays relevant country information based on user location.

Simon Cho--manager, interactive marketing of Hyundai Motor America Hyundai--says that if a consumer in, say, China, enters www.hyundai.com into a browser, the uniform splash page will come up, but it will be specific to China. "They will, of course, see content in Chinese, but we are also including drop-down bars allowing viewers to choose other languages."

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He says the directive came from Hyundai's Seoul headquarters. "We have had multiple meetings since December to talk about delivering consistent brand identity across the organization and subsidiaries," he says. "The problem they found was we have no consistent style guide for Hyundai Motor home pages in different markets, and everyone is using different logos and so on. So there is a big opportunity for HMC and related companies to have consistent messaging."

The new splash page launched last week, with Hyundai Motor's U.S. division the first to switch over, per Cho. "Then [Hyundai] will expand the domain across the world and consolidate content-management to share assets."

When a new marketing push called for a 360-degree digital view of a new vehicle, for example, each subsidiary in various Hyundai global markets would create their own such view, wasting time and talent. Now, when relevant, subsidiaries will do more sharing. "A foundation based on efficiency means we are working closely with subsidiaries if there is a common denominator we can use across the globe," he says. "The basic sharing is already happening--Canada and Australia, for instance, make their own footage."

Cho says a side benefit will be higher U.S. consumer traffic because a lot of consumers would erroneously visit Hyundai.com, hitherto a purely corporate site, rather than the former U.S. retail site, HyundaiUSA.com. Now the simpler, more intuitive URL will lead them to the right place to shop a Hyundai vehicle.

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