At first glance, these two manufacturers could not be more different. And yet the Romanian manufacturer and the electric car pioneer from Palo Alto, California, have one thing in common: extremely loyal customers. “Private Loyalty” statistics are updated monthly and Dataforce took a closer look at the loyalty of drivers in the German Private Market, examining brand and model loyalty in detail. This allows us to answer two very different questions regarding loyalty:
1) How loyal are customers?
Statistics reveal that former Dacia or Tesla drivers remain loyal to the respective brand in more than 70% of all cases when changing cars. This is an outstandingly high figure when considering the other end of the scale with brands where eight out of ten former customers turn to a competitor! And it is also possible to analyse for which makes and which models the brand’s former customers are opting.
One of the models with the highest volume on the German Private Market, the VW Golf, achieved a loyalty rate of 23% in YTD February 2019. This means that less than a quarter of the former owners of this model opt for the same one again when buying a new car. 34% of the other buyers switch to another model within the brand and not always into a larger vehicle, in some cases into smaller ones. The remaining 43% actually turn their backs on the brand. This was not always the case. Back in 2015, the Golf achieved a loyalty rate of 35%.
2) How successful are brands in winning third-party customers?
Almost every new model launch is based on the manufacturer’s desire to win customers from competitors. While some of the planned conquest rates turn out to be wishful thinking, the Private Loyalty statistics allows for clear data driven results. For example, the Ateca, the first SUV of SEAT, was launched in 2016: the data shows that three out of four current Ateca customers did not drive a SEAT before. Most of these new customers were won from outside the VW group, primarily from BMW, Mercedes and Opel and the 3 Series, C-Class and Astra respectively.
