Case Honda Element (Business & Marketing Case Study)

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Case Honda Element
The development of the Honda Element since 1998 brought a successful light truck that has embodied its target market's preferences (Crawford and Anthony). Honda Element achieved success under thorough investigation of what is going to be made and who it is for. However, like most successful stories in the business, the Element did not have a good start as well. It became unexpectedly popular to a different target market than who it was supposedly made for. This had the company investigating the failure to reach the target market -- males of Generation Y, particularly, first-time car buyers. The Element had undergone a total transformation to suit the real taste of its target market.
Honda applied the new product process to reinvent the Element, this time directly on what the Generation males had to say for the car they dream of. The stage-gate process put the product under four phases before reinvention. In the first phase, the opportunity identification, the Element sought popularity from the wrong target market and it led to pursuing the right target market's attention; thus, the reinvention of the Element. The concept generation phase brought the target market into the picture to influence the Element's redevelopment. The target market was observed in an exhibition and their demographics were analyzed. This process elucidated that the young males' demographics' influence on preferences is different from the older generation. This leads to the third phase which is the concept evaluation where designers come up with styles and designs that consider the findings in the second phase. These designs and styles were weighed and decided which would pass as the initial part of the Element. The fourth phase is where the development of the reinvented Element is checked by its technical tasks and marketing tasks. In the technical tasks, the Element was put to an experience-test by young males and some of the high officials of the company. The executives were invited for approval based on their experience with the Honda Element. As for the marketing tasks, the company decided to go for non-traditional advertising, along with the traditional one like television ads, to reach the target market. They targeted the car shows and colleges, and let the news circulate among car enthusiasts as part of the marketing strategy. The initially manufa...