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Every company wants high customer retention numbers, and the car industry is always particularly focused on brand loyalty. A recent report from J.D. Power and Associates focused on analyzing customer retention for car manufacturers. The report tracked loyalty to the manufacturer rather than specific brands within the manufacturer’s product line. For example, if a customer switched from a Scion to a Toyota or a Toyota to a Lexus, that customer was considered to be loyal to the manufacturer overall.
Based on this report, Toyota leads the pack in terms of customer retention within its line of products, but General Motors (NYSE: GM) is slowly closing the gap. In fact, J.D. Power and Associates said GM’s customer retention is up three percentage points higher over the prior year, and this increase appears to represent a trend. Could it be that there is hope for American-made cars?
In terms of loyalty to specific brands within the manufacturers’ lines of products, Toyota and Lexus (both owned by Toyota) ranked first and second for loyalty with Chevrolet (a GM brand) coming in fifth as the highest ranking American made brand.Â
While it’s certainly interesting to see an upswing in customer retention for GM, I think the most interesting part of this report is actually the companies ranking lowest in terms of customer retention. What’s going on at Isuzu that the company only has a 1.6% customer retention rate? I know Isuzu has a limited product line, but 1.6% really jumps out as significantly poor. Maserati North America has a limited product line, but still manages to retain 41.9% of its customers.
So what do I walk away from this report thinking?Â
- Everyone still loves Toyota
- GM’s efforts seem to be paying off
- Isuzu has some problems
What else does this report tell you? Do you have any insight to share about the brand loyalty and customer retention woes of Isuzu? If so, please leave a comment. I’d love to get a better understanding about Isuzu’s problems.
601 days ago
One should be somewhat careful with these numbers. If there were no brand loyalty and everyone chose their next car randomly, the numbers would match market share numbers – larger manufacturers would be at the top, smaller manufacturers at the bottom.
It would be interesting to see these numbers corrected for market share. Maserati would presumably be at the top, but the order of the others might be different.
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484 days ago
[...] gather the data, I went to this site:Â http://www.bizzia.com/brandcurve/brand-loyalty-in-the-car-industry-toyota-still-1/, an article about brand loyalty, published in 2007. The article references JD Power and Associates [...]
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