Fred Diaz

摘要

Fred Diaz took over as CEO of Mitsubishi Motors North America on April 1. In 2013, after a 20-year career at FCA's various iterations, he left to oversee Nissan's truck strategy, before being deployed to Japan to work on Mitsubishi global sales and marketing. Struggling Mitsubishi has a new lease on life as part of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, so we sat down with Diaz to see how he plans to restore the brand in North America. What is the direction for Mitsubishi in North America? The first order of business was to engage with the dealers [to find out] what are the problems, what do we need to do better, and find out their temperature for wanting to do the hard things to change the brand. The biggest problem as a small brand is awareness. We haven't been investing in our media space. This year marks our return to network broadcast TV and the most budget spent on media advertising in 11 years. And we are the title sponsors of a college football bowl game, [the Mitsubishi Motors Las Vegas Bowl]. Before the Alliance, the brand was struggling mightily to get dealers to invest in our brand. Since the announcement of the Alliance, interest in our brand has increased exponentially.