Asked and Answered: Hyundai's Dean Evans

Q: Is there a Hyundai owner community that has developed organically, or that the brand has pushed? Is that a promising avenue for you?

A: I think those are all very powerful marketing moves that as an auto brand you should do and cultivate and fertilize and develop. We're not obviously as advanced as Subaru. In the performance areas is usually where that comes from. The midsize sedan community? Not so much hot on getting together in Tennessee in August. But the BRZ folks? They're mad about getting together, right?

And so, a lot of times it's performance-oriented or sports-oriented. There are pockets where it works. We don't have anything on the books that we're doing today, but we are looking at how do you develop those communities. Do you just pull them up from specific models, or do you try to do something bigger than that? … It's better to bring them all together for a purpose they love rather than an artificial purpose.

The Sonata customers don't want to all get together and talk about their Sonatas. It's an appliance, not a passion. And so getting people together in one fell swoop for a bigger, higher order is our philosophy around how to take customers and cultivate those communities.