At the last Automechanika (2023), Ollie Barr spoke to Nathan Podmore, Continental tire’s marketing manager. They elaborated on some key changes in Continental’s brand image, both visually and in the way the company plans on working with customers.
We asked Nathan about the significance of this Automechanika on continental to which he stressed the point, ‘We’re here at Automechanika and Continental are launching a lot of their new product range. We’re part of the auto-diagnose equipment and automotive range. So, we’re launching a whole new brand previously ‘Krypton’ and coming out as fully ‘Continental.’ We’ve now got lots of new fully rebranded sections such as our emissions testers, our MOT bays and other garage equipment. And we’re also now selling tire changes and wheel balances and spanning into our tire section as well so it now means that Continental can provide a one-stop shop for all of the garage needs.’
He was then asked to elaborate on this rebrand. He said, ‘We are fully launching again, we’ve got seven new products that are exclusive here and the first time to be seen, we’ve got tire changer wheel balances. As I say, coming in from the Continental tire side and mixing it with the Diagnostics and equipment that we currently sell means that we can supply a lot to workshops and give them a much better experience and be a one-stop shop for this. For me, it’s also just launching the new continental branding. I think the silver that we currently have is a really good and can fit into anyone’s garage easily and look, very stylish and give them all the stuff that they would want. Success for me, is to introduce the whole brand and all of the new product ranges we’ve got. We’ve got the seven new products we want to really shout about, and it’s showing that Continental has a stylish product and branding and bringing that forward with all these new ideas that we have can bring in the workshops and all of the new products that we have. I think a success for me would be to talk to those customers that we’ve already got and talk to new customers and find out what they think of our new range.’
Next, we asked him what he has learnt from the show. He was excited to tell us, ‘The biggest thing I’ve learnt here is we’ve had a lot of customer feedback and I think the products that we’ve introduced have followed from that feedback, so it’s nice to get that response from the customer directly on our products. And I think we’ve learned what to possibly do in the future. There has been a lot of R&D for us with our new products and what they like about our current range and how excited they are of the new stuff that we have. So, we’ve got to learn what they (the customer) want for us to innovate in the future.’
Finally, we wanted to understand what his own and Continental’s goals were for the future. ‘So growing the business we have a lot of new things that we are now selling. We’re expanding into new ranges, we have our new PNC system, we’re trying to future-proof a lot of these things. A lot of these are coming into the industry and we’re getting ahead of those so the growth factors for us is to add all of that into one range and build from there. We are coming out as a new brand ourselves, we’ve now pretty much moved Krypton over so we’ve now got 285 years of combined garage experience that we can bring forward and grow from. With the experience that we have in diagnostics we can mix that with the new tire range. (Automechanika) gives us a chance to talk to a lot of the customers that we don’t get to travel down to as much and just have a meet up with some of the people that we’ve known for years in the industry. Also we can talk and discuss with other stands that maybe we don’t see as often and build those new relationships.’ Was his positive response.
