Where's the love?

As Fro writes, Marque loyalty can't be bought. It can, however, be thrown away like so many banana skins. Here are two tales:



Tale the first
Mazda Australia have a "Mazda Clubs" section buried on their website. They list the MX-5 clubs, the OzMazda Club Forums, two (!) MX-6 clubs and the RX-7 Clubs webring. Since the inception of REACT, I have been trying to get in contact with Mazda to get REACT and the other Rotary car clubs added to the clubs listing in preference to the dodgy-seeming webring but to no avail. Until recently, the only way to contact Mazda.au from their web site was to use an email form. I submitted many emails, asking for REACT to be added to the site or even publicising all the rotary clubs in Australia.

The closest I came was one day when I happened to be in Sydney on holidays, someone from Mazda rang up and said they had received my email and weren't really sure what I wanted to happen (this is despite my saying something like: There are rotary car clubs in Australia! Why aren't they listed in the Mazda Clubs section! Here are their web addresses!). I spoke to them for at least 20 minutes. This was back in 2003.

Now that they have a proper snail-mail address available, I might try again.

Tale the second
Shortly after REACT was formed, our President, who is not unknown in the wider Canberra community, approached the local Mazda dealer and asked for a little support in return for some free publicity around the time of the RX-8 launch. His response was, "will it sell me more cars?". Now, dealers aren't really Mazda Australia, but you'd think they'd have a vested interest in appearing to support a local club.

Contrast this with the love shown towards the MX-5 clubs in particular with Head Office support and local dealer support and I have to wonder where the rotary clubs are going wrong.

More gratuitous Mazda pictures