On May 17, a kick-off meeting for VISTA 2012-2013 was held in Bangkok, which was attended by 14 Asia VISTA market leaders. Representing an estimated 646 teams, the leaders discussed rules and guidelines, as well as their objectives and ambitious for the upcoming competition. The kick-off meeting follows on from a marketing communication managers kick-off meeting held in Korea last month.
Peter Voorhoeve, Vice President Aftermarket, opened the meeting with an address titled ‘VISTA drives retail excellence’, where he stressed the strong link between excelling in both VISTA and aftermarket activities.
While addressing the discussion topic “What it takes to be winner”, market leaders then introduced their initiatives for promoting VISTA within their markets, before agreeing on some ambitious goals for VISTA 2012-2013, including:
- Not only retaining all eleven markets who took part in VISTA 2011, but also expanding to Singapore and Hong.
- Increasing participation by ten percent.
- Obtaining more than 90 percent participation from the region’s dealerships.
- Obtaining a 95 percent participation rate across all three theoretical rounds.
The kick-off meeting then ended with a dinner and ceremony, with the following prizes awarded for noteworthy initiatives:
- VISTA Retail Excellence was awarded to Region Thailand, for their plan to allow each team one hour per day for answering VISTA questions.
- VISTA INSPIRE was awarded to Region Malaysia for organising a road show to promote VISTA within their region.
- VISTA Whizkid was awarded to Region India for keeping track of login times on the number of users answering VISTA questions.
“We have a very strong commitment to VISTA. Our market leaders spend a lot of time with teams during the registration phase, and are also very active in following teams up,” says Romi Kapur, Asia Competence Development project manager. “Most of our markets have employed various motivational ideas to promote VISTA in their respective markets.”
For example a number of Asian markets, including Korea, Indonesia, Thailand and India, have started their own local VISTA-inspired competitions to take place in the alternate years between global competitions.
Market leaders in Asia have also been very active in creating incentives and rewards. “For each round in VISTA 2011 we had a Hero award, which wasn’t score-based but was instead given to the team we believed best exemplified the VISTA objectives,” adds Kapur.
Not surprisingly with initiatives like these, VISTA has grown rapidly in the Asia region over the past few competitions, and for VISTA 2011, there were 565 teams, comprised of 2197 participants. This year they hope to attract close to 650 teams.
If you think these targets are unrealistic, its important to point out that of a possible 113 Volvo dealerships in Asia, 106 participated in VISTA 2011. Another extraordinary achievement was the fact that over the three theoretical rounds, dropouts were virtually zero. Of the 565 teams that registered, only one team failed to complete Round Three.
With more great initiatives and such enthusiasm already being shown before the competition even starts, it will be exciting to see what milestones are achieved in VISTA 2012-2013.
VIDEO: Joachim Rosenberg, EVP Volvo Trucks APAC, explain the benefits of participating in VISTA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdCo6jacbkw
