Hyundai Design Guru Invokes Spirit of Jimi Hendrix
November 1, 2013 Leave a comment
October 31, 2013, 6:15 PM
Hyundai Design Guru Invokes Spirit of Jimi Hendrix
By In-Soo Nam
Hyundai Motor Group Chief Design Officer Peter Shreyer at a lecture on auto design in Seoul on Wednesday.
Quick, what’s Kia’s brand image? Hyundai’s? If you didn’t get past “Korean” or “relatively inexpensive,” you’ll probably see why Hyundai Motor Group’s Chairman Chung Mong-koo says the company needs to urgently build up car buyers’ awarenessof its two brands.The chief designer for both Kia and Hyundai, Peter Shreyer, understands his boss’s urgency, but his approach is anything but hasty.
“We need to develop our brand piece by piece,” he said at a lecture on car culture and brand building at the Hyundai Card Design Library in Seoul on Wednesday. “We need to allow a little bit of patience. You cannot go into Formula 1 this year and win the championship next year. That’s impossible.”
What do Jimi Hendrix, Steve Jobs and Mercedes all have in common, he rhetorically asked his audience. They consistently followed their own ideas and continuously improved, he said, adding that this is what it takes to be a trendsetter.
Mr. Shreyer joined Kia Motors in 2006 as the company’s top designer after working as chief designer for Audi and Volkswagen. In January this year, he was promoted to oversee design for both Kia and Hyundai.
“BMW and Mercedes-Benz, they have not always been premium brands,” he said. “Audi was, say, for accountants or just foreign people.”
Looking back decades later, we can see big changes in those German brands, but Mr. Shreyer says he doesn’t like the idea of dropping traditions and radically overhauling designs to make a brand an overnight success.
Acknowledging Chairman Chung’s “great push about how to develop, how to build brands,” he said some things about strong brand identities are fundamental.
“I remember a time when I was talking to company executives and we came out with this comparison: Kia is like a snowflake. Hyundai is like a waterdrop. Kia has coolness. It’s like architecture. It’s somehow structural. Hyundai is more fluid, elegant and dynamic. I like the comparison. For me, this is like a basic, kind of a philosophy. They will stay as they are. No abrupt changes.”
The competition between Kia and Hyundai is as beneficial as it is to compete against bigger global rivals, he said.
“It is important to differentiate the two brands,” he said. “For the Korean market, Hyundai takes up almost half the market and Kia the rest. If they all looked the same, it would be awful.”
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