Interest in the brand has shown a sharp increase after an experiment with miniature racing circuits was staged at four major shopping locations during the summer.
“We don’t have conversion figures yet, but the exercise resulted in more than 1,600 requests for product information and test drives,” Mazda UK marketing director Mark Cameron told AM. “We’ve decided to stage another series of events next year.”
More than 4,000 shoppers at London’s Brent Cross, Merryhill at Dudley, Meadowhall in Sheffield and Braehead, Glasgow, took up the challenge to match times set by professional drivers around 100x30m circuits in car parking areas.
“There was no charge and everyone thought it was great fun. From our point of view, this was an excellent way to demonstrate the qualities of our MX-5 and RX-8 models. Each circuit was used to more than 80% capacity.
"These centres are extremely busy, of course, and the fact that they were visited by around 2.3 million people during our competition made them a fantastic shop window for the brand,” said Cameron.
Record registrations in September and October have put Mazda on course for a total of 51,000 sales for 2007.
TS2 and Sport versions of the Mazda2 supermini, launched in September, are already subject to delivery delays of three months.
“Demand is running 30% ahead of what we planned and we hope additional supplies will allow us to catch up by February,” said Cameron.
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