What Price Car Customer Loyalty?

Good Morning - Article appeared at opportune time for me as I am about to go car shopping - I was hoping for more than a "Toyota-Lexus" promotion which appears to be the gist of this article. Thankfully I was able to glean a couple of salient points so the article was not a total loss.

From the perspective of a person who has owned multiple Lexus vehicles over the last six years, I rate the cars and SUV's well above average but my local Lexus dealer experience is well below the bar set by my local BMW dealer. In many metro areas, the luxury brands like Lexus, Mercedes and BMW only maintain one franchise dealer. When you're the only dealer in town offering a particular brand, you can succeed without offering a best in class dealer experience. My Lexus brand loyalty has very little to do with my local dealer.

My loyalty definitely ties to the quality of the car and the dealer experience. I left the US car brands in 1987 for Honda. The decision was totally based on quality and dealer repair experience. I've owned Honda and Acura brand cars exclusively since that date. As my children have grown to adults they also almost exclusively stick to the Honda cars for the same reasons. My wife loves the Acura dealer experience vs the old US dealer experience (where they treated her like she had no intelligence). US cars are certainly much better quality than before. However, I am stuck after years of positive experiences with Japanese cars. Why should I risk changing when the Japanese quality continues to meet my expectations?

Are you kidding me? Did Bryan Bergsteinsson drink from the Toyota/Lexus sake tank in order to say that the dealership experience “…isn't necessarily meaningful for customers when they're thinking about buying a car.”??? What? I worked with Toyota for six years and even though the finished product was of the highest quality, even I would recommend an extra 45 minute drive to family/friends so that they wouldn’t have to “put up with” typical dealership shenanigans! I’ve spent the last two years consulting as a consumer behaviorist and can tell you that regardless of how great the product is, if there is brain damage involved in acquiring it, consumers will opt out not only of the dealer experience, but the entire product purchase as well! The result is that not only does the dealer lose business, but the manufacturer does as well! Here’s the bigger issue…unfortunately the perception is that a car dealership is full of unsavory characters (Look at the commercials on TV in your area…Want to make your second largest purchase from a Blue Genie?). Unfortunately there is much strife/conflict between the manufacturers and dealers. Buying a car should be quick/easy/awesome…There are a few dealerships that deliver (Ever heard of Charlie Gilchrist of Southwest Ford in Weatherford TX and his customer philosophy? You should!).
Sam Palazzolo, Pathos Leadership Group LLC

The principles revealed in “The Paradox of Excellence” explain why typical loyalty program don’t work and why life on the “new feature treadmill” just accelerates corporate exhaustion. They are both attempts to bribe rather than engage customers. Human nature inherently creates the paradox that, “The better you do your job, the more invisible you become . . . to everything but bad news.” Product planners and marketers so strongly believe that people buy their products because they value “the product,” they are inhibited from grasping what customers really value and reinforcing that. When you take action out of what customers really value then powerful engagement is a natural consequence. Dave Mosby, co-author, “The Paradox of Excellence: How Great Performance Can Kill Your Business”