Most consumers would be hard-pressed to remember a marketing campaign for Kia; it would even be a stretch for non-car enthusiasts to think of a single Kia model. Most people would probably be limited to ascribing the marque with fairly ordinary designs, a cheap price tag and Korean ownership.
At the beginning of this year, the car manufacturer drafted in Toyota's commercial director, Paul Philpott, to shake things up in the UK as managing director. Armed with his background in marketing and a firm understanding of the intricate workings of UK car dealerships, he is now attempting to change consumers' perceptions - or lack of them - of Kia.
This drive coincides with ambitious growth plans on the part of Kia and its sister marque, Hyundai. Sales combined, the two form the world's sixth-biggest motor firm. But Hyundai-Kia wants to push on.
It is already successful in the key growth regions; the marques are major players in India, and industry analysts place them at either number two or three in China on combined sales. Factories are also being constructed in the US.
Europe, where the two marques have a combined 3% of the market, is the next big battleground. The company is building a Hyundai factory in the Czech Republic and opened a plant in Slovakia last year, increasing Kia's sales capacity across Europe.
It is vital to the marque's prospects to have a UK focus. Even Philpott admits that there is a widely held belief that if a car maker is not big in Germany and the UK, it cannot be a force in Europe as a whole. The UK is a lucrative market: we no longer have British brands for loyalty purchases, we pay more for our cars and we have one of the highest penetrations of car ownership in Europe.
Philpott's task may not be as tough as it sounds. While Volkswagen, Ford and Vauxhall have become so mass-market they have all the status of a soap-powder brand, the quality of their engineering and design has long been largely beyond question.
But Kia, which has now recovered from its shoddy image of bygone years, is nipping at their heels. Its cars are all up to the same specifications as rivals, including air conditioning and twin air bags as standard. Seven of its eight models are available with diesel engines, and recent launches including the Carens MPV and cee'd saloon have been well received by motoring experts, who claim that pound for pound, drivers get more for their money with a Kia.
The cee'd is also Kia's first European-designed and built car. Aimed at the same market as the Ford Focus and the Vauxhall Astra, the model comes with an unprecedented seven-year warranty.
Industry experts say long warranties have everything to do with clever marketing and nothing to do with reliability. 'There is a big difference between offering a warranty because you have a poor reputation and offering it as reassurance to people who are buying a Kia for the first time,' says Chris Donkin, partner at Courland Automotive Practice, an automotive consultancy.
Professor Garel Rhys, director of the Centre for Automotive Research, points out that Kia models have low fuel consumption, giving the marque an upper hand in the environmentally friendly stakes, a must for the future direction of any car manufacturer. While the cars are well-designed and, he believes, will sell well in Europe, he thinks the company
is not doing enough to get people into showrooms. 'They are not just cheap cars; it is a value brand, but Kia needs to let people know about them,' he says.
This lack of awareness is one of the first negatives Philpott is trying to address. Currently recruiting the company's first marketing director, Philpott, who knows his way around a media schedule, is also shifting more of his spend, £3.5m in all, to television to build awareness. A UK-specific TV campaign for the cee'd broke last week, and the marque will sponsor Five's crime-drama strand, which includes popular US import CSI.
Although he claims he is looking for only modest retail growth, Philpott's campaign will also be a beauty parade for potential dealers. The company currently has 140, but experts say it will need more franchises on board to achieve its targets. The best way a car manufacturer can encourage dealers to sell its product is by proving it will invest in advertising.
Kia plans to grow its share of UK sales from 1% to 3% over the next decade, putting it on a par with Citro‘n and Nissan. However, cheap - a word used a lot when people are discussing Kia - will no longer help build its market share.
In 2004 and 2005, when the UK car market hit a slump, other manufacturers including Fiat, Vauxhall and Ford took steps to protect their share by slashing their prices and letting consumers know about it.
Philpott is openly critical of how his company reacted. '[Kia] continued to cut media budgets and prioritise price-led advertising. We were on TV only three weeks of the year, and that was just telling people how cheap the cars were. Sales have become stagnant.'
Experts think Kia has been hiding its light under a bushel. 'It's a classic situation,' says Donkin. 'The reality of the product quality now exceeds perceptions of the brand.' He adds that since the marque poached Audi's head of design last year, the standard of Kia's forthcoming products will make its 'cheap and cheerful' positioning redundant.
Philpott knows that he has to change public perceptions of the marque, but says he cannot move as fast as he would like. 'You can't go straight to telling people that we make exciting well-designed cars, but [this campaign] is the first step of that journey,' he says.
His role in Kia's European expansion is by no means a small one, but unless Philpott leads a revolution and gets consumers to understand that Kia is not just about cheap cars, the marque is in danger of losing more sales to the bigger, established players in Europe such as Ford and General Motors, who will lower their prices further to retain share.