Improving personal selling activities: a case of Nordic Car Company in Ho Chi Minh City - Vietnam

Abstract

When global automobile market gets a remarkable resilience, especially concentrating in emerging nations, and Vietnamese economy started to integrate deeper into global trade, there were many luxury brands distributed mainly in Ho Chi Minh city and Ha Noi Capital. Coming along with this trend, premium cars such as Roll-Royce, Porsche, Maseratti, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Audi, BMW and so forth were retailed in Vietnam with higher numbers recent years. Although luxury car segment is always a potential market for car-retailing investors, there are only few brands which have performed well for years and become top of mind when customers decide to buy a premium car. Their success could be easily explained by having effective ways in operating sales force. This fenced off the penetration of other famous luxury brands which tried to attack this lucrative market. In August 2016, Nordic Car Joint Stock Company (in short, it would be called Nordic Car in this thesis) decided to distribute Volvo cars as a dealer with two branches in Ho Chi Minh City and Ha Noi Capital. However, sales results have been too low since Nordic Car in Ho Chi Minh City was established. This research will explore the causes of low sales results of Volvo in Ho Chi Minh branch. The findings of the study revealed that ineffective personal selling activities played the most important role in low sales results comparing to other factors from August 2016 to Dec 2017. Moreover, some reasonable solutions would be suggested in order to improve personal selling activities of Nordic Car company in Ho Chi Minh branch.