Should OEM ratings be public? – January 22, 2007
J.D. Power and Associates’ decision to publicize ratings on top motorcycle manufacturers for the first time has drawn mixed reactions from OEMs.
J.D. Power’s new buyer satisfaction survey in itself is not new, as several of the industry’s large manufacturers have used it over the past nine years to chart their progress against different industry benchmarks.
What is new is the public’s access to some of the brand-specific findings. For the first time, consumers could go onto J.D. Powers’ Web site and see how 10 motorcycle manufacturers performed, according to the new bike buyer, in five areas: product, quality, cost of ownership, sales and service.
Victory and BMW rated the highest in the most categories, with Polaris’ motorcycles rating “among the best” or “better than most” in all five categories. BMW rated “among the best” or “better than most” in four categories. Suzuki was the only other OEM to have the top two ratings in at least three categories.
J.D. Power and Associates officials said they notified OEMs last spring they were making a change in the distribution of the survey’s findings. Their reasoning: to spur improvement in the marks and ultimately, consumer satisfaction.
“We’ve basically found that satisfaction in this industry has not really improved since we’ve started doing this report,” Tim Fox, a research supervisor for J.D. Power and Associates, told Powersports Business. “That was one of the things that raised a flag in our minds. We as a company like to make a positive impact on industries so consumers are ultimately the benefactors of that impact.”
Last spring, J.D. Power officials approached some of the manufacturers with concerns they had with the brand information going public. One of the concessions the firm made in publicizing the results was the promise to OEMs that the 2006 Motorcycle Competitive Information Study would not be rankings, but a ratings system. So, unlike J.D. Power surveys for other industries, there would be no winner announced. That’s why any resulting promotion from the survey’s results that may come from OEMs cannot include the words “award winner” or “No. 1.”
That element of the survey is not something that all of the OEMs agree with.
“Personally, I’m a little frustrated we can’t reveal more,” said Mark Blackwell, vice president of Victory Motorcycles and Polaris’ international operations, noting he would like to see each OEM be given a total score.
“We’re not agreeing with the methodology because we did real good. We’re agreeing with the methodology because it has been consistent since ’99 and we’ve been steadily improving and for the last few years, we’ve done extremely well.”
American Suzuki Motor Corp.’s Bob Mueller, the company’s sales development manager, sees it differently, believing public ratings do not benefit the OEMs. “We’re not interested in seeing (J.D. Power public ratings) in our industry,” he said.
Mueller said Suzuki has used its own customer research information instead of J.D. Power’s survey findings for in-house purposes for primarily two reasons: J.D. Power’s lengthy window of time that new bike buyers receive the survey and its ultimate goal: gauging customer satisfaction rather than loyalty.
“The questions that really count are those that determine loyalty,” Mueller said. “Satisfaction is a component of loyalty, it is not an end goal itself. You can go into a dealership and be satisfied because your expectations were met, but that doesn’t mean that there was anything exceptional enough about the experience that would cause you to recommend that dealership or product to a friend or relative. So the real question is, how likely are you to purchase again? That is the end goal.”
The J.D. Power survey asks for responses from new bike buyers during a ninth-month window, meaning consumers can receive the survey anywhere from four months after their purchase to 13 months.
Mueller believes that’s too long of a time period.
“When you buy a motorcycle, you’re going to resist any notion early in your ownership that you didn’t make a good purchase,” he said. “Nobody wants to be called a fool.”
That same notion won’t be nearly as prevalent 13 months into the purchase, Mueller said. “There can be significant changes in customer responses during this period,” he said.
Fox of J.D. Powers said he “can definitely see why some manufacturers would be concerned because of the different timing in ownership periods.” But, he said there is no way a manufacturer can somehow benefit by getting a higher percentage of 4-month surveys than 13-month surveys since that cannot be controlled.
Plus, he said manufacturers were involved in the development of the survey’s methodology at the outset and changing it now would disrupt the nine-year trend and lessen the importance of the survey.
“That’s really where the manufacturers get the value out of the data, to see where they are improving,” Fox said. “If we change that methodology, that completely goes away, and the study doesn’t have near the value that it would if we were to keep it the same.”
Kawasaki Motors Corp.’s Bruce Stjernstrom, the company’s marketing director, believes the survey is “a work in progress in a lot of senses. They’ve been very successful in a lot of different fields, but our business is different. They recognize that.”
And J.D. Powers, Stjernstrom said, has been “willing to work with manufacturers to make the survey more valuable.
“I don’t see any negative side of it,” he said of publicizing some of the survey. “We’re evaluated by a lot of different people in a lot of different ways everyday. They’re a very credible company. There’s really nothing to fear from it.”
Todd Anderson, vice president of marketing for Triumph Motorcycles (America), called this year’s publicizing of certain elements of the survey “an interesting step.” But he said because each of the categories include such large areas, “it’s sort of hard to look at those ratings and really understand what’s going on in the consumers’ minds.”
Polaris officials said the publicized information backed up what was revealed to OEMs in greater detail.
“Nothing we saw in this year’s study really jumps out as being out of sync with the trendlines that we’ve been seeing,” said Dave Beres, Polaris/Victory’s research manager. “As we look across that database, there is nothing here that jumps out as being inconsistent with, ‘Boy, they did particularly well in the back-up data, but for some reason looked very poor’” in the publicized data.
And those ratings weren’t kind to everybody.
Two manufacturers, Buell and Kawasaki, received the lowest ratings in three of the five categories.
Kawasaki’s Stjernstrom said the company takes the ratings “at face value” and looks at ways to “make everything better.
“We’ve been working with (J.D. Powers) for a long time and we feel that there is some good information that has helped our company and helped us try to make our products better and our relations better with customers and dealers,” he said. “I think that’s an important part of it. It does serve a purpose for us.”
Efforts at reaching Honda, Yamaha and Harley-Davidson for their comments on the survey were unsuccessful.