Auto-Emotion: You Are What You Drive

We'd like to believe we are rational decision-makers.

We go online. We compare prices. We assess features. We use new-fangled apps based on complex algorithms to analyze brand attributes against needs, budgets, geographical area, projected weather patterns, road conditions, political ideology (just kidding on that last one).

Ultimately? For most it's how we feel. Color. Line. Styling. Dashboard configuration. Cupholders (cupholders? you'd be amazed). Back of the seat video. Whatever. We are suckers for features that appeal to the atavistic need to impress. If only ourselves. And our kids. Spousal skepticism notwithstanding.

And it seems to be working - for the manufacturers. Brand loyalty is down. About 45% of US cars are foreign-made or built in the US by foreign-owned companies. And the vehicle commanding the greatest loyalty? Hyundai. Yup, Korea. From a country most Americans can not locate on a map (literally).

So, it is working for the auto makers because while they would love to have customer loyalty, they also win by denying their competitors that same reward. It is a truism of marketing that repeat customers are more profitable for whoever is selling because that purchase costs less to acquire.

So we can learn a lot by watching those TV ads and understanding how they successfully play on the emotions. We all have a little movie running in our heads. In which we star. And in which we are sitting at the wheel of a new car. Despite the state of the economy, the decline in household income, the paucity of job growth, new car purchases are way up so far in 2012. Talk about emotion... JL

The Economist reports:

AFTER 11 years of daily use, the family kidmobile is nearing the end of its economic life. Meticulously maintained, it still runs fine. Or, rather, it does now the air-conditioning system has been overhauled—at greater expense than the car is actually worth. With the vehicle fully depreciated, the annual cost of ownership has been minimal for the past four or five years, but is now set to rise—as one electronic module after another can be expected to give up the ghost and need replacing at $1,000 or more a pop. Sadly, the time has come to contemplate putting the trusty old war-horse out to pasture. But what on earth to replace it with?

Purchasing a new car is the sort of emotionally draining experience your correspondent dreads.
Perhaps that is why he keeps his cars so long: he has owned one of the two old Lotuses in his garage for 40 years, having built it from a kit in 1972; the other one he has had for the best part of 24. As a replacement for the kidmobile, he knows what he ought to buy, but is torn over what he would like to have instead.

There is a clever compatibility tool called My Car Match on Edmunds.com, a popular site for American motorists seeking advice on what to buy and how much to pay. The algorithm presents users with a series of questions about their needs and preferences—how many people the vehicle will have to carry, how much luggage, what type of vehicle, what price range. Each time, users are asked to select the best out of three vehicles presented, while the list of possibilities is repeatedly refined.

After going through all the hoops, your correspondent was told he should buy a Kia Soul, when he had hoped it would recommend at least a more up-scale Hyundai Genesis. So much for inflated aspirations.

Car buyers should examine their needs rather than their wants, Philip Reed of Edmunds.com points out. “In too many cases, people choose a car for its styling or because it is a trendy favourite,” he notes. But that implies consumers can easily ignore all the subliminal signals coming from those structures in the brain that are responsible for predicting the outcome of decisions and providing emotional rewards.

In his book “Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars”, Paul Ingrassia, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, pointed out how American culture has long been a tug of war between the practical and the pretentious, the frugal and the flamboyant, hot-wings and haute cuisine. Your correspondent believes that applies not just to America, but is probably universal—a crucial aspect, no less, of human nature.

More than anything else people purchase, a car broadcasts so much about who they are—or, rather, who they like to think they are. The whole business is fraught with stereotypes, often amusing, rarely meaningful, but once in a while spot on. For instance, Bentley nowadays implies "footballer’s wife". Cadillac screams "old codger trying to look cool". Honda mutters something about being reliable but boring. Mercedes-Benz says simply "taxi" in Europe and the Middle East, and "too old for a BMW" in America. Porsche is code for "desperate male having a mid-life crisis".

With 45% of the cars on American roads being imports, there is also the nationality of the car to consider. Long ago, in his extremely amusing book “How to Repair Your Foreign Car: A Guide for the Beginner, Your Wife, and the Mechanically Inept”, Dick O'Kane listed some of the quirks of foreign cars and what such things implied about their owners. Thus, the British build cars that need to be tinkered with—regularly. The Swedes make strapping vehicles that will ride over, under or through any obstacle. The Germans manufacture technological marvels, which, when they break, have to be taken to a high priest from the factory for repair. The French, ah the French, who can understand the French?

For most motorists, the trickiest part of buying a new vehicle is deciding which brand. The one that commands the greatest loyalty in America today is (no kidding) Hyundai. In this year’s annual survey of car-brand loyalty by JD Power and Associates, a market-research firm in California, 64% of Hyundai owners said they would replace their existing vehicles with another of the same make. Ford, Honda, BMW and Kia were runners up in the loyalty stakes.

But brand loyalty is not what it used to be. Female buyers have become particularly fickle. So have the well-heeled who buy executive and luxury models. However, it is the young—the Gen X and Gen Y buyers—who are the most capricious. Nowadays, over half of motorists replace their present vehicles with another make. They do so because either the manufacturer does not offer the type they want, or they have been put off by a bad experience with their current car.

Another reason why loyalty has lost ground is because, these days, it is rarely rewarded. Existing customers can pay thousands of dollars more than someone switching from another make. Brand loyalists tend to haggle less, and car salesmen take advantage of the fact. Moral: if you want another Ford, do not drive up to the dealership in your existing one.

Loyalty aside, what a brand actually says about a carmaker is quite a different matter. If a brand does its job well, it links the consumer to the product being purchased by building an emotional image or bridge between the two. Either way, the product’s brand-image and the consumer’s self-image merge into a single entity that rewards the buyer with feelings of certainty and satisfaction.

The car-brand perception survey conducted annually by Consumer Reports National Research Centre in New York scores how consumers view each brand in seven particular categories: safety, quality, value, performance, environment, design and innovation. Combining the scores for each category gives an overall ranking that reflects the image consumers have in their minds of the manufacturer. The survey is reckoned to be particularly good at shedding light on what brands consumers are likely to purchase.

This year, the survey of brands people are most likely to buy once again lists Ford, Toyota, Chevrolet and Honda (in that order) at the top of the list. These four brands were singled out by more than half the people who participated in the survey. Even so, all the leading brands have seen their scores slip over the past year as high petrol prices, the woeful economy, huge recalls and other glitches have all taken their toll on brand values. And while safety used to be the most important consideration, followed by quality, value and performance, penny-pinching customers now prize low operating cost and reliability above all else.

So, what car should your correspondent buy? For a start, he needs five seats, with enough cargo space for the odd weekend trip. As the bulk of the driving is done in heavy traffic, an automatic transmission is essential. Neither all-wheel drive nor four-wheel drive (they are different) is necessary, as he rarely goes off road deliberately and has not encountered snow in ages. His brain says be sensible and buy a new Ford Fusion, which will be in the showrooms shortly.

But his heart lusts after the 1965 S-type rotting away in a local Jaguar repair shop. He had a second-hand 3.4-litre S-type (the current kidmobile's direct ancestor) half a lifetime ago, and ran it lovingly until both he and the car were broke. He has half a mind to do the same again.