Maruti is the most car desired brand: Vuclip survey

BMW remains the most preferred luxury car in India in terms of brand perception

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Delhi | September 28, 2012

Vuclip, the world's largest independent mobile video destination, unveiled the findings of its mobile surveys on four-wheeler purchasing forecast and brand sentiment in India. The findings were revealed during ad:tech Bangalore 2012 held on September 27 in Bangalore. Both the surveys were administered and delivered through Vuclip's mobile site, m.vuclip.com, for duration of eight days each.

Buying behavior: The purchasing forecast survey included responses from as many as 184,786 mobile phone users from India with 68% respondents being males. The survey, which ran from September 5-13 2012, found that 37% of the mobile respondents plan to buy a new car within six months, while 54% of all respondents plan to buy it in the next one year. 48% of the respondents indicated that they have a purchase budget of under Rs 700,000, while 28% had a budget of Rs 700,000-15,00,000. This indicates a huge opportunity for the small and mid-segment car manufacturers to influence the purchase decision of these prospective buyers by aligning their product launches to consumer preferences.

Surprisingly, 39% of all women respondents had a budget of over Rs 10,00,000 compared to only 31% of all men having a similar budget to buy a car. Cost was the leading priority in four wheeler purchase decisions for 15% of the respondents, followed by value, brand, engine and looks for 12% each of all the respondents. Safety was the priority for 11% of the respondents while 9% preferred comfort and service plan. Features mattered most to 8% of all respondents. Though, cost remained the priority for men (17%), more women looked for value for money (13%) when making a car purchase decision. A lower percentage of 12% of all women cited cost as the key factor, on a par with a similar percentage of women respondents choosing brand, engine/power, style/looks and comfort.

Brand affinity: The brand sentiment survey took into account responses from 109,242 mobile users from India on Vuclip with 67% respondents being males. According to the findings of brand sentiment survey, served from September 9 to 17, 2012, one in four respondents (24%) claimed to own a Maruti, double its nearest competitor, Hyundai. Even among most desired car brands, Maruti emerged as the top choice for 21% of the respondents in India, while there was a tough competition between Hyundai and Honda with 14% and 11% votes as the desired brand respectively. Toyota, Ford and Tata were the most desired brands for 9% each of all respondents.

Current vs desired: Interestingly, in the current versus desired brand comparison, Hyundai and Ford registered a growth of two percentage points each as the desired brand against the current number of owners of these brands. Honda, Chevrolet, Toyota, and Tata gained one percentage point as desired brands against their existing ownership patterns, while for Mahindra, the existing versus desired brand percentage remained unchanged.

Luxury car brands: In the upscale luxury car segment, BMW was the preferred choice for both men and women, with 29% overall votes, though men (32%) seemed to like it much more than women (21%). The black horse in the race for the second most preferred luxury car brand in India came out to be Bentley (10%), followed by Audi (9%) and Mercedes Benz (9%) which left behind the usual suspects, Jaguar (8%) and Rolls Royce (8%).

The fight for the second spot in luxury car brand perceptions was more pronounced based on gender – while after BMW, Bentley was the clear choice for women (13%), men gave equal weight to Bentley, Mercedes Benz and Audi (9% each), followed closely by Jaguar and Rolls Royce (8% each).

Commenting on the survey findings, Meera Chopra, Vuclip's Vice-President and Head of Advertising, APAC and Middle East, said, “The findings of our surveys reveal major indicators on car purchase decisions and brand preferences in India. It is amazing to see how mobile is transforming into a productivity tool, empowering you with almost instant access to such mass-scale insights from real users. How else can you activate feedback from 100,000-200,000 respondents in just over a week to tap market sentiments? With more than 14 million active users in India, our surveys also offer deep demographic insights on the purchase behaviour and preferences of men and women that could help advertisers, marketers and content aggregators to generate tailored content as per the need of their target audience through hyper-local, rich and engaging campaigns that help raise purchase intent.”

Sunila Dhar, DGM - Media & Marketing, Maruti Suzuki India, said, “Maruti has always been referred to as the car of the nation and we take pride in designing our cars keeping in mind consumers changing needs and preferences – a car for every need. We are happy to see that Maruti is trending on mobiles too and are confident that Vuclip's wide reach and vast network will help brand marketers to get a pulse of what consumers want and design products accordingly.”

“As product innovation and differentiation takes foreground, it has become essential for brands to reorient their brand engagements to pave the way into the customer's cluttered mind. Mobile serves as a perfect platform for brand marketers to reach out to a wide audience in a short timeframe and Vuclip's technology coupled with its data insights enables these marketers to devise a novel strategy to connect and engage with their consumers,” said Avinash Singh, Media Manager, Maruti Suzuki India.

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