Seat Changes Brand Positioning

At this week's UK press preview of the new Seat Altea Multi Sport Vehicle, or MSV as they call it, Mark McKenna SEAT's UK Head of Marketing revealed that the new face of the Altea will be used for the new generation Toledo and Leon models.

He said, "Since the repositioning of the SEAT brand under the Audi Brand Group, the Altea was the first product to come out of the new Group's sport design technology ideals concept.

In future we will have an extrovert image with cars of a sporting design. Up to 18 months ago we were known as the affordable brand. Now we are moving to producing products with sporting design and greater performance but we don't want to loose what we are already known for".

McKenna added." We started selling SEAT cars in the UK in 1985 and by 1995 our annual sales had climbed steadily to 11,000 vehicles but from then until 2003 they climbed rapidly to 34,000 units. We do not plan to oversupply vehicles and damage residual values - ours are better than most of the main volume manufacturers and we don't want to loose that. We are not a volume brand, we are not up-market and we want customers to come to us out of choice"

The Altea is not a mini MPV nor is it a hatchback as we know it today, it is a little of both. The Altea creates a new sector in the market aimed at the family buyer around 25 years of age and with one to two children. Currently the average age of our customers is around 45 years old".

"We see Altea giving us incremental growth with 2,500 sales this year and 5,000 next and sixty per cent of Altea sales will be for the variants costing under