Automotive Reputation, Review and Marketing Research Newsletter | The Rev

REV #009: Love, Deals and Tough Towns

Written by Director of Marketing | Apr 25, 2024 12:00:00 AM

Welcome to the REV. A briefing that goes deep into the Widewail Automotive Reputation Index data, surfacing the most interesting insights. Every 3 weeks we Rank, Explore & Visualize automotive reputation & sentiment data. 

All data is sourced from the Widewail Automotive Reputation Index (unless noted). The Index aggregates over 1.6 million Google reviews from 16k new car dealerships in the U.S. Customize the dataset like it's your own personal spreadsheet. Try it out. It’s free.

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RANK

So Much Love

Let’s look at brands with the fewest negative mentions of staff.

While STAFF is the #1 driver of positive reviews, mentioned in 56.9% of positive reviews, the topic is not a major driver of negativity.

Mentioned in only 17.49% of negative reviews, it’s the #7 driver of negativity.

Our hypothesis: unhappy customers prefer to highlight a specific problem and are understandably reluctant to bash an individual by name.

In the topic rankings for the fewest negative mentions of staff, MINI takes the win and GM makes a strong showing.

Topic Rank

Brand

Mentions

Difference vs. Benchmark

1

MINI

13.46%

-23.03%

2

VOLKSWAGEN

14.20%

-18.78%

3

BUICK

14.44%

-17.42%

4

GMC

14.51%

-17.06%

5

CHEVROLET

14.58%

-16.63%

 

We will release more in-depth automaker topic rankings over the next few months. 

First, the top 5 brands to buy a car from and the top 5 to service a vehicle at. We’ll launch that project in partnership with Car Dealership Guy on May 6th.

EXPLORE

Deals

Deals don’t drive positive reviews.

But for these four brands, deals have an outsized influence.

Each brand is either affordable or affordable luxury. While deals don't drive positive reviews for most brands, they are effective reputation drivers for these brands.

Topic Rank

Brand

Percent Difference vs. Benchmark

1

MITSUBISHI

+55%

2

ACURA

+47.58%

3

MAZDA

+42%

4

HYUNDAI

+31%

VISUALIZE

Top 5, Bottom 5

Tough Towns (lowest reputation health score)

  1. Kahului, HI
  2. Poplar Bluff, MO
  3. Montgomery, OH
  4. Lihue, HI
  5. Ithaca, NY

Friendly Towns (highest reputation health score)

  1. Concord, NC
  2. Coral Springs, FL
  3. Buford, GA
  4. Mckinney, TX
  5. Amherst, NY

*We filtered out any towns with less than 5 dealerships for both lists

When I published REV #001 on DealerRefresh, Joe Pistell commented, ”Love to see:

Tough Towns: Top 10 Cities with the lowest average ranks.”

Well, Joe, I finally got it done - it only took 6 months.

We collected data on 868 cities across the US to find the 5 with the lowest health score and the 5 with the highest. To remove outliers, we only looked at towns with 5+ dealerships.

The toughest town for dealers in the US: Kahului, HI.

Concord, NC, takes the top spot for friendliest. I’ll be honest; I’m not seeing much of a trend here.

Here’s the full list of cities if you’re curious.

See you in 3 weeks - Jake, Marketing @Widewail