The
first "Open House" dedicated to the new Alfa Romeo
Giulietta took place last weekend (May 22-23) across
Italy and it saw no less that 90,000 interested people
pouring through the doors of the brand's 200 domestic
dealers although this burst of initial interest hasn't
yet translated into firm orders which remain somewhat
unexpectedly sluggish.
Those 90,000 people inspected closely the 200 cars that
had been made available by Alfa Romeo to its dealers,
one for each point of sale, and 10,000 test drives took
place. The Italian order book for the exciting new
C-segment Giulietta, which replaces the decade-old
former Car of the Year winning Alfa 147, at the
end of last weekend stood at 2,700 units, which shows
good initial interest from Italian consumers for the
Alfa Romeo Centro Stile-design 5-door hatchback, but is
still down from generally expected ordering levels at
this point. However
17,000 good contacts were made with potential buyers
over the weekend.
The
most popular models to be ordered so far by Italian
buyers are the 1.6-litre JTDM-2, the highly regarded
second-generation Multijet turbodiesel with 105 CV,
along with the more powerful 2.0 JTDM-2 Multijet with
170 CV. The most popular specification level to be
chosen so far is the "Distinctive" trim and the most
popular colour is
Bianco Ghiaccio (Ice White).
The initial successes of this initiative means it will
be repeated across the Italian Alfa Romeo dealer network
this weekend (May 29-30) while a new dedicated website,
under the slogan "Everyday Thrills", went into motion
last Friday. Over last weekend traffic to the official
Italian Giulietta website increased a claimed five-fold
and the previous average daily 8,000 users of the
comprehensive car configurator function reached 60,000
configurations over the weekend. At the same time
traffic to Alfa Romeo's Italian website this month has
doubled to 870,000 "hits" while the section of the
official site dedicated to the new Giulietta has now
seen 56,000 visits in three weeks.
Meanwhile a promotional campaign headlined by actress
Uma Thurman got underway last Friday across all media in
Italy: TV, print, billboards, internet and radio. In
Italy the new Giulietta range starts at 20,300 euros for
the "Progression" version equipped with the 1.4-litre
turbo petrol engine with 120 CV and rises to 29,000
euros for the range's highly exclusive "flagship" model,
the Quadrifoglio Verde fitted with the powerful and
dynamic 1750 TBi petrol engine with 235 CV.
