Yperion
Cornering Kingpin
Australians rate best car brands
Australian car companies collectively spend millions of dollars on marketing to strengthen the desirability of their brands.
So the latest findings by the University of Melbourne will come as a shock. The university's Business School surveyed 2000 car owners to rate how well they would recommend their cars to friends.
The survey was based on a system called the net promoter score (NPS).
German marques came out the winners ahead of Japanese carmakers such as Subaru, Toyota and Honda.
The Australians - Mitsubishi, Ford and Holden were a poor third. It's an interesting result considering Holden and Ford are two of this country's biggest sellers.
Study leader, associate professor Mark Ritson, says it pinpoints which cars deliver the best overall customer experience.
He says the best performer was BMW with a score of 59, followed by Volkswagen with a ranking of 47. Audi, which has spent big money on its revival in Australia, scored 45, finishing ahead of Mercedes-Benz on 39.
Mitsubishi and Holden both scored in the red, with a minus 16; Ford was worse, scoring a minus 25.
Ritson says more than half of the owners of the four leading German marques are "promoters". They will actively encourage others to buy the brand and are more likely to buy their next car or a second car from the same brand.
"Perhaps even more impressive is the remarkably low number of detractors that these brands have," he says. "More than a third of Holden drivers are detractors and they will spread an enormous amount of negative word-of-mouth about their car. Contrast that with either BMW or VW which have almost no detractors to speak off. Their whole customer base is either passive or a promoter of the brand.
"It's important in a category such as automotive to recognise the crucial importance of low numbers of detractors for a brand. Detractors spread more than 80 per cent of the word-of-mouth on a brand.
"We are much more likely to tell our friends bad things about our products than the good things. For a big social purchase such as a new car, this can have a major impact on sales."
The study provides depressing reading for Australian producers. Mitsubishi, Holden and Ford all posted dire results, he says. The bottom-ranked brand was Saab.
"There are many potential explanations for this position, but perhaps the most likely is that Saab's operations in Australia are handled by Holden," Ritson says. "This is a company that struggles to generate positive NPS for its own brand, and is probably too busy and too distracted with this mission to successfully manage an additional brand."
The NPS is based on analysing the results from a single key question: How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or a colleague?
The NPS is calculated by measuring the difference between the percentage of customers who give high responses (promoters) and those who give low ones (detractors). Customers who scored in the middle are deemed passively satisfied and are not calculated in the final score.
Source: http://carsguide.news.com.au/story/0,20384,20804538-21822,00.html
(they're family had B5 Passats & A4 Golfs)
)
