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Study: Ford tops mid-year ranking of brands in the US

Filed under: Marketing/Advertising, Ford

2013 Ford Fusion - front three-quarter view

YouGov’s mid-year Brand Index rankings of America’s best perceived brands has been released, and Ford has found its way to the top. The Dearborn, Michigan based manufacturer beat out online shopping giant Amazon, The History Channel, and home improvement superstore Lowe’s, to take the top spot.

Ford jumped from sixth overall in 2012 to first for 2013, but those that have been watching these rankings shouldn’t be hugely surprised. Ford was rated the best perceived automotive manufacturer by the same organization last year. The Blue Oval’s success on the overall brand rankings is made all the more impressive by the complete lack of other automakers on the list.

YouGov (that is, survey respondents) cited Ford’s first quarter of 2013 business, which saw an increase in market share and the best earnings recorded in over 10 years. Successfully launching the Focus and Fusion (pictured) and keeping them fresh in the minds of consumers has also contributed to Ford’s best overall score.

YouGov’s Brand Index asks survey respondents whether they’ve heard anything positive or negative about a brand in the last two weeks. That includes anything in advertising, news or word of mouth. Following the old saying “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” the responses, both positive and negative, are correlated into the Buzz score, which rates the brand’s perception among the public. Check out all the results in the official press release below.

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Ford tops mid-year ranking of brands in the US originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 18 Jul 2013 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ford, Mercedes-Benz named top brands in new Harris polls

Filed under: Ford, Mercedes-Benz

The latest Harris polls are out, and the big winners in the automotive sector are Ford and Mercedes-Benz. The two brands made the top of the list for full-line and luxury automakers by scoring highest in terms of customer connection, commitment, equity and trust.

Ford took the top spot for full-line automotive due in part to strong new products, beating out Chevrolet, Honda and Toyota. Chevy finished second, while Toyota dropped from first place to fourth overall. Hyundai and Kia were pointed out as fast risers in the survey, though neither automaker made the full-line top 10.

On the Luxury front, Mercedes-Benz took the top prize away from Lexus, though Toyota’s luxury arm only slipped one spot to number two. BMW, Infiniti and Acura round out the top five.

A total of 25,099 people aged 15 and up were randomly asked about 60 brands out of a total of 1,273. Each brand was given a total of at least 1,000 responses, with rankings chosen based on a calculation of Familiarity, Quality, and Purchase Consideration. Hit the jump to read over the Harris Interactive press release.

[Source: Harris Interactive]

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Ford, Mercedes-Benz named top brands in new Harris polls originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 27 Mar 2011 17:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Report: China tells foreign automakers they must build low-cost local brands

Filed under: China, Plants/Manufacturing

Chinese flag If you want to do business in the Chinese market, you have to play by the rules set out by the Chinese government… and those rules are subject to change. Such is the case in the automotive segment, where officials from China are reportedly set to add some requirements for automakers that wish to update any contracts in an effort to build more vehicles in China.

Apparently, as much as 30 percent of any additional production capacity over what has already been agreed upon will be earmarked for the Chinese market, and that percentage of vehicles would have to be sold under a new Chinese brand name at a “low cost.”

It’s not necessarily more brands China wants, it’s intellectual property. “During 10 years of trying, China has become a big factory for foreign companies, and their Chinese partners didn’t get advanced technology. Through this industrial policy they would like Chinese carmakers to get IP in order to own this market,” said Lang Xuehong, automotive analyst with Sinotrust, quoted by Financial Times.

Will the scales fall in favor of more access to the lucrative Chinese market or will the desire to keep valuable intellectual property under the roof of the company that actually earned it through actual research and development triumph? We’ll see.

[Source: Financial Times – sub. req.]

Report: China tells foreign automakers they must build low-cost local brands originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 21 Mar 2011 17:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chrysler’s Francois has a lot of answers for brands, but not yet for Chrysler

Filed under: Marketing/Advertising, Chrysler, Fiat

In-flight wireless Internet access and e-mail is both a boon and a curse to Chrysler chief marketing officer Olivier Francois, who says he already works 20 hours a day running marketing for both Chrysler, as well as five of Fiat’s brands. His frequent flight time was his last refuge to write and think through other work on the nine brands he manages without endless meetings or putting out fires.

And his email can be intriguing. On Nov. 11, he was flying Delta from Detroit to San Francisco. In flight, he received an email from Burmese Foreign Minister Nyan Win advising him that Burmese pro-Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi would soon be released from prison in part, read the email, because of the public pressure Fiat had generated through an ad in Europe last year that went viral spotlighting her imprisonment.

Good news, to be sure. But the email meant that Olivier spent the rest of the flight dictating edits by email from 35,000 feet on another ad he ad he commissioned for the cause, shot in Hiroshima, Japan at the 11th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates only days before with the Dalai Lama climbing out of a Chrysler 300 (the 300 is not in evidence, but he shot it in case he wants to run the ad in the U.S.) The new ad, featuring Lancia vehicles, which broke this week on European TV and the Internet, had to be changed to celebrate the political dissident’s release (watch it after the jump).

Francois, a self-assured French-born executive whose job is running Fiat’s marketing, Chrysler’s marketing, as well as serving as CEO of all aspects of the Chrysler and Lancia business as CEO of those brands, appears supremely confident in every thing he touches. And that encompasses a lot: from selecting ad agencies – six in the last year – to actually writing ad copy, composing music for ads and chasing down celebrities he wants photographed next to his cars.

But there is one brand task that Olivier admits is starting to get the better of him: fixing the Chrysler brand messaging. “It is a wonderful brand with great American roots, but finding the idea to reintroduce it…very difficult,” says Olivier.

Continue reading Chrysler’s Francois has a lot of answers for brands, but not yet for Chrysler

Chrysler’s Francois has a lot of answers for brands, but not yet for Chrysler originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 18 Nov 2010 19:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Video: Seat touring car flips into crowd at Brands Hatch over weekend

Filed under: Motorsports, Videos, Hatchback, SEAT, UK, Racing

That’s not gonna buff out – Click above to watch video after the jump

If you’ve ever found yourself as a spectator at a race track, it’s easy to lull yourself into believing that you’ll be as safe as can be just so long as you keep a crash barrier between your brittle bones and the lightspeed chunks of metal blasting by. Thing is, that’s not always the case. The interwebs are full of videos of cars gone airborne, leaping guard rails and tire walls by leaps and bounds to come crashing down in the middle of a passel of spectators. We can officially add the video after the jump to that list of horrors.

According to our English cousins, Portugese driver Francisco Carvalho had a bit of a mishap at this weekend’s World Touring Car Championship event at Brands Hatch. Carvalho was competing in the Seat Leon Euro Cup Race when he received a nudge from a fellow racer. Instead of losing a position, Carvalho’s car was sent veering off of the course and into a crash barrier before bouncing end-over-end and vaulting back over the wall. The crash sent a crowd of race marshals fleeing before the car came to a stop, but amazingly enough, no one was injured. Not even Carvalho. Hit the jump to see the devastation for yourself.

[Source: YouTube via Autoblog UK]

Continue reading Video: Seat touring car flips into crowd at Brands Hatch over weekend

Video: Seat touring car flips into crowd at Brands Hatch over weekend originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 19 Jul 2010 14:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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