Nissan’s Move from California to Tennessee Allows Opportunity to Trim Staff
When most automakers are looking for opportunities to trim white collar staff, Nissan’s choice to move its headquarters from California to Tennessee is taking care of the problem for them.
Currently about 1,300 sales and marketing employees staff the California office, and so far 750 have told Nissan North America that they won’t be following the company to its new Nashville headquarters.
Of course, some re-staffing will be necessary, but the automaker will look for opportunities to continue cutting costs; the move in itself has been designed to integrate its headquarters and North American production facility. The Japanese automaker will re-staff its North American office and put California behind them.
“There are people we would’ve liked to have come with us,” commented Vice Chairman Jim Morton Jr, who has been one of the leaders behind the move to Nashville. “But we have now seen who will come and who won’t, and we’ll deal with it.”
Not all employees will be easy to replace, mind you, with some key executives also choosing to stay behind. Jack Collins, the brand’s long-time VP of product planning won’t be going to Tennessee, and neither will VP of sales and marketing Jed Connelly, who has been instrumental in driving Nissan’s recent growth in market share.
According to Morton, Nissan has already been taking steps to hire others to fill the shoes of those choosing to stay in California, either hiring or offering jobs to more than 200 people.
Interestingly, though, not all new employees are coming out of the Tennessee area, what the state had initially hoped would happen. Instead Nissan has been targeting the wealth of automotive experience in Detroit, a workforce that has been decimated in recent months and will continue to be trimmed according to plans by General Motors and Ford Motor Company, as well as other automakers which are streamlining operations.
Detroit isn’t the only recruiting center, mind you, as the brand is looking for help in more than ten major markets that have experienced auto workers, such as Atlanta, Georgia and Louisville, Kentucky. Now comes the challenge of sifting through the respondents to fill the 200 vacant positions, as no less than 27,000 resumes have resulted in the employee search.
At this point it is difficult to say whether or not Nissan will continue to hire over and above the above stated 200 vacancies, as there are 42 percent of the 750 Californian workers readying to move, or 315 staff members, leaving 235 positions in the air if the automaker has plans to fill each and every desk that was occupied in its California office.
And while it looks as if Nissan is trimming its staff in order to decrease monthly costs, in reality its Tennessee office could be facing a employee shortage thanks to the number of new models rolling into its showrooms, including its new Versa subcompact people-hauler, arriving this summer, redesigned Sentra compact sedan, reworked Quest minivan, and critically important 2007 Altima midsize sedan, available in November, each of which will need dedicated and ongoing sales and marketing plans.
The current Altima has been the automaker’s best seller in North America, so it should find plenty of ready and willing buyers with or without much advertising support. Likewise, high fuel prices should help the subcompact, fuel-friendly Versa make friends quickly, although the word will still need to be spread via the normal advertising channels. The Sentra, mind you, replaces a car that has fallen off most compact buyers’ radars due to an aging design, and therefore will need more marketing support than, say, the Honda Civic needed with its recent redesign. The Quest finds itself needing even greater backend support, as the current model, which doesn’t appear to be all that different than the new one, at least visibly, is North America’s least favorite midsize van, thanks to an unorthodox and somewhat unfriendly interior design and troublesome reliability. Nissan once again finds itself needing to reinvent itself within the minivan segment, but stuck with a model that hardly seems any different than the one most van buyers have chosen to shun, getting the word out that the newone is better than the old one, let alone the competition, will take creativity and megabucks.
The updated Quest comes at a time when some automakers, Ford being one and Mazda rumored to be another, are considering leaving the minivan segment for versatile crossovers, a vehicle trend that appears to be growing in popularity. This could open up opportunities to Nissan, if it chooses to directly target disenfranchised owners of vans that will be going out of production. This said there’s a reason why some automakers are leaving the segment; it’s shrinking. In other words, with or without the move to Tennessee and a significant reduction in sales and marketing staff, Nissan is facing an uphill battle in the minivan segment, and will also find buyers within the subcompact and compact segments a challenge to win over.
Nissan has been out of the subcompact segment since it dropped its Micra in 1989, after experiencing strong sales for most of the ’80s. Making a success of its new Versa will require some savvy marketing skill, even if the car is as good as it, on paper, appears to be. Small car lovers have long since migrated to Hyundai and Kia, due to their thrifty Accent and Rio models, as well as Chevrolet, which has long been re-badging Suzuki Sprints with bowties and now works the same magic with its GMDAT (Daewoo) South Korean-made subcompact, the Aveo. Toyota has also maintained a presence in the subcompact segment, with its Echo, and looks to reap the reward now that its new Yaris hatchback and sedan are available, and Honda, while never previously offering a subcompact model, should pull in significant sales of its new Fit just because the Honda nameplate normally does well in every market segment it does business in - excepting pickup trucks. The Versa should find its niche, but it won’t come without a fight.
In other Nissan new model news, there’s also a refreshed Maxima for 2007, plus Nissan North America will finally import an all-new version of its legendary GT-R sports coupe.
And what about Infiniti? A new G35 sedan, new G35 coupe, and someday a new full-size Q-series flagship sedan. Infiniti’s plans to go global, launching across Europe in 2008, shouldn’t affect Nissan’s North American headquarters, at least not directly.
As for finding employees to fill vacant shoes, Nissan shouldn’t have much trouble finding capable staffers with 27,000 resumes at the hands of its HR department.