This is a case study in understanding reputation opportunity.
If you go to the top of the WARI, you’ll find Longo Toyota, sitting pretty at the top, generating over 700 reviews a month. Don’t get me wrong, Longo has an incredible reputation, but it’s also located in a major metro area (greater LA), selling a popular mass-market brand. This likely isn’t you. But that is ok.
Reputation is a game for relevance fought at a local level. While being a national reputation leader is undoubtedly fun, it’s not necessary if the goal is to use past customer content to drive new business locally.
As an example, let’s look at Mungenast Acura of St. Louis, which was recently featured in AutoNews.
In the last few years, after Kurt Mungenast purchased the dealerships, it has risen from 56th to 15th in Acura volume rankings among 277 U.S. dealers. In 2024, the store sold over 1,100 new Acuras and completed around 25,000 service appointments.
That growth deserves a shoutout—congrats to Mungenast on its growth.
But the article also reveals a major opportunity: massive unrealized customer engagement. Even without exact 2024 numbers for used car sales, we estimate the dealership handles ~26,000 transactions annually—96% of which are in service.
Here’s the point: reputation is a numbers game, and most of those numbers are in fixed ops. With Americans keeping vehicles longer—now averaging 13 years—service demand is only growing.
Despite this, Mungenast averages just 9.3 Google reviews per month. That’s 3rd out of 4 Missouri Acura dealers and well below the 10.7 national average. With 2,166 transactions per month, Mungenast is converting a mere 0.4% of customers into reviews.
