Industry Experience

Automotive Marketing Research

Few product categories are as exciting and as influential as the automotive industry.

For over 100 years, automobiles have captured the hearts and spirits of millions of people worldwide. The automotive industry is global, fiercely competitive, credit-sensitive, and environmentally significant. And now, the industry is rethinking the very notion of what a vehicle is and how it might be used.

As the industry explores what “mobility” will mean in the 21st century, a new age of innovation and revolutionary change lurks just over the horizon. While reinventing itself, the automotive industry must continue to meet today’s consumer needs, plot strategies, design and deploy new vehicles and services, and improve marketing efficiencies.

Decision Analyst’s Automotive Consultants can help the auto industry by delivering creative research designs, scientific thinking, advanced analytics and modeling, in-depth findings and insights, and strategic recommendations to OEMs; Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 systems and component suppliers; automotive dealers; aftermarket suppliers; and automotive financial services.

Qualitative Research Services

Decision Analyst’s Qualitative Research Team works extensively in the automotive industry, focusing on research and development related services to not only assist in the design of new vehicles, but also to optimize the launch of new vehicles, and marketing strategy. These services include:

• Vehicle clinics (focus groups and depth interviews).
• New concept exploration (online and traditional depth interviews).
• Optimizing the buying experience (ethnography and depth interviews).
• Improving interactions between dealers/salespeople and customers (ethnography and depth interviews).
• Exploring advertising concepts (online forums and in-person depth interviews).

Ideation

Decision Analyst's Innovation Team works with automotive clients to develop truly new concepts using our ideation workshops and innovation research. We help you strategize across the departmental silos that can be inhibitors of innovation. We help you to explore every aspect of a new vehicle’s potential success, including product design, features, marketing, and the sales environment. We do this through:

• Ideation and brainstorming to create new automotive features, designs, and systems.
• Ideation and brainstorming to create new service offerings in the areas of technology and mobility.
• Ideation and Innovation Workshops.
  • The Imaginators®: Our own community of innovative consumers who have the ability to generate large numbers of highly original ideas for new products and services. Each panelist ranks in the top 4% of the general population in terms of idea-centric creative abilities. As a result, the ideas conceived by the Imaginators®’ are truly unique and breakthrough in nature.
  • Corporate Ideation Sessions: In-person ideation sessions among salespeople, R&D professionals, marketing executive, engineers, researchers, etc., are often included in ideation projects. The expert knowledge of corporate employees, combined with Decision Analysts’ Innovation Team, often leads to breakthrough ideas.

Sophisticated, Quantitative Automotive Research

Carefully designed survey research is a powerful decision-support tool. Combined with in-depth qualitative research, precisely crafted surveys can resolve a number of business and marketing issues—and can do so with a known degree of statistical accuracy. Decision Analyst’s automotive research experience comprises the following:

Advanced Analytics Services

Today, every industry is impacted by exponential increases in data from many different sources, and the automobile sector is no exception. The growth of data from the connected car (Internet of Things), data generated by onboard sensors and devices, and social media data are examples of the exploding volume of data. Data alone does not reveal the answers to business questions. As you collect more and more information about your markets and target consumers, Decision Analysts’ Advanced Analytics Team can help you convert all of this data into knowledge and understanding, a foundation for sound decision-making. Decision Analyst Advanced Analytics Team helps its automotive clients develop a keen understanding of consumer needs and motivations in order to help guide product improvement, development of new products and services, engineering, marketing, sales, and strategic planning.

Decision Analyst’s Automotive Databases

Decision Analyst reaches Light Vehicle Owners/Intenders through its American Consumer Opinion®, a worldwide online panel of consumers in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Consumers can sign up to become members in one of 11 languages. Sample is available in over 200 countries. Our panel is one of the largest Internet panels in the world. Panelists’ vehicle information is available in major markets by make and/or model and model year. In addition to online panels, Decision Analyst conducts automotive research using traditional methodologies, such as telephone, mail, personal interviews, on-site intercept, and recruiting to a central location for personal interviews.

Why Decision Analyst?

Decision Analyst is a leading marketing research and marketing consulting firm with over 45 years of experience in automotive innovation, research and analytics. We are uniquely qualified to design, manage, administer, and consult with you on automotive and auto-related business issues. Our expertise in analytical research systems gives us the ability to go beyond simply obtaining data; we can also determine how to best utilize the data to develop new markets, target the right consumers and grow your business.

Automotive Research Services

If you would like more information on Automotive Research, please contact Bonnie Janzen, President (bjanzen@decisionanalyst.com), or call 1-800-ANALYSIS (262-5974) or 1-817-640-6166.