Almost 22 years’ ago, a young Alastair Doak left journalism to venture into pastures new in the upper echelons of Mazda’s Australian operations – and he hasn’t looked back since.
Arriving on our shores in the late 1970s as a teen to Sydney, the Scot embarked upon his university studies – first in Canberra pursuing science, before moving into journalism in Melbourne.
Always a car enthusiast, it wasn’t long before Doak was being paid to write about them as a journalist and with a bit of elbow grease he was quickly at the top of his game leading The Australian’s motoring desk as Editor between 1992 and 1999, followed by a stint in the equivalent role at The Age.
But in 2001 a fresh challenge presented itself and the game changed.
“I’d been a journalist for around 10 years up ‘til that point,” Doak tells Wheels in his thick Scottish brogue, undiluted despite all the years passing since he migrated.
“And I guess I became a journalist so I could drive cars – for as long as I can remember I have been fascinated with cars. But I also knew at the same time that, you get to the point where you start to think there’s a lot more in the industry happening that I don’t know about as a journalist. You get to bounce around kind of the surface of it, but you never a really get a deep dive.
“So I just thought, well maybe if you join a company, you’ll learn more things about the industry that you love and products that you love – that was kind of the motivation. And at the time, certainly Mazda was promising to go on this growth journey and it was coming up to the first of the zoom-zoom products. I thought, well why not? Let’s join.
“I was Motoring Editor of The Age and I was really enjoying it, it was a good place to be. Obviously the paper had a lot of clout so it was a hard choice to leave, but I moved into Mazda as head of public relations and I think the first car I launched was the Mazda 6 and then it just went from there.”
Mazda has long been at the top end of the sales charts in Australia, and continues to consistently hold the number-two spot behind market-leader Toyota each year. But back when he started, now Marketing Director Doak says, it was just beginning to really gain momentum and occupies a seat at the big boys’ table globally as we’re such an important market for the company.
“I think the numbers the year before I started were like 30,000 and now they’re over one hundred thousand, so there’s been that kind of growth ever since,” Doak tells us.
“And I can remember a few months after I started, maybe even the second month, we sold 4000 cars in June 2001. There was this buzz around the place and people said, ‘oh, we’ll never do those kind of numbers again’. But of course we did and still do, so it’s been fun.
“After about six or seven years I got the opportunity to move into the marketing department. And the good thing about marketing, which isn’t the same in every place, is that we own the product strategy. Because of Mazda Australia’s strength within the global Mazda network, we get invited to all the global meetings and to talk about product development and brand and PR and other things.
“We’ve got a seat at that table, which I think is is quite different to a lot of the other companies. A few weeks’ ago we were in the US talking about global brand stuff there with our colleagues from the US, Japan and Europe. So that’s pretty cool. It’s a great opportunity and that’s part of the reason why I’m still here after all this time.”
Doak is keen that Mazda should lead where others follow trends, such as with the introduction of its MX-5 sports car in the 1990s. Nowadays, that includes electrification.
“If you can try and find the space in the market, the initial thought, the opportunity, then hopefully you can jump in there and do incredibly well. For example, things like the CX-50 in the US – they’ve probably tapped into a kind of an unmet need in that market. And the reaction to that has been incredibly positive over there,” he says.
“Obviously in the past there was the MX-5. Some might say you were just redefining a product that was defined by, you know, MGF and other things way back with the kind of classic British sports car, but nobody was really doing it at the time.
“I think we’ve said previously that we are always hungry for product. We have the broadest portfolio of product of all the major Mazda markets. And I guess we always go in with the attitude of ‘why can’t we sell this?’ rather than ‘why can we?’ There’s a subtle difference, but you’re always trying to make it work. You’re always trying to say what’s the opportunity with this? Even if it’s quite small and doesn’t make sense. That’s our attitude with all of the large architecture products – why can’t we make it work?
“We are never really pushing for one model to be everything. We were, for a while, the Mazda three car company and there’s dangers in that. So we would rather have a portfolio of good sellers rather than just one or two. You’re appealing to more customers that way – you’re covering a larger part of the market and, and you’re also spreading your risk. Because those cars, they go through ageing product cycles and if you spread that out then you kind of protect yourself from that risk.”
In recent years it could be argued Mazda has gone more upmarket, with its products closer to luxury than cheap and cheerful. But is a ‘premium push’ really its intention?
“We’re certainly not walking away from the volume part of the market,” Doak says. “I guess the premium-ness is, well, us looking at what does Mazda bring to the market that’s different to other people? Ultimately that’s what brands are about, isn’t it? So you need to appeal to a certain group of people with a code, design language, dynamics or technology in the car or wherever else it is.
“So if you get that right, then is that premium? If it appeals to people who may have considered more luxury premium brands, does it actually by default make us premium? Maybe not. But I think we’ve been reasonably successful at that over the years anyway. Even with things like Skyactiv to some degree as well that we’ve done things a little bit differently from other people and we’ve got a customer base who likes that and who appreciates that and comes back for more.”
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