Car Talk

In “Automotive Research Insights,” comScore Chairman and Co-Founder Gian Fulgoni and Vertis Director of Marketing Research Scott Marden shared their smarts on car buyers. Marden focused on car shoppers’ trends broken out by life stage, and he had so many stats that it’s hard to recount any here. One interesting notes: he says African Americans represent the greatest consumer opportunity.

Much of Fulgoni’s focus, meanwhile, was comparing car manufacturer sites against third party sites, and comparing how consumers search and shop for different car brands online.

Fulgoni said that from May 2004 to May 2005, total internet users increased by 5.8%, while the automotive category grew a scant 2.4%. Digging deeper, visits to manufactuer sites jumped 23%, while visits to third-party resources fell by 4.7%.

He also examined how consumers behave differently long before they’re ready to buy a car compared to when they’re buying a car in the next several months. Online configurations, finding a dealer, and financing all climb significantly as car buyers move from long term to near term. Consumers tend to use manufacturer sites for near-term buying and third-party sites for long-term buying.

Also reviewed are breakouts of shoppers for Asian cars compared with shoppers for domestic cars. Fulgoni noted, “The Japanese auto shoppers will tend to shop for Japanese autos and stay within the Japanese auto segment, whereas the American shopper will tend to look across both the domestic and the Japanese sites. There tends to be two segments of the market developing here.”

Another finding was that there are hardly any demographic differences of consumers visiting a range of different car brand sites. “Demographics alone do not provide sufficient discrimination between shopper groups.” The solution? It requires a new term (oh boy): “cognographics.” Add this one to your marketing dictionaries. Fulgoni defines cognographics as “the complete details of a consumer’s internet usage (sites visited, number of pages downloaded, time spent, transactions conducted, etc).” He says this more accurately reflects overall lifestyles.

If you attended Ad:Tech, Susan Bratton offers a friendly reminder that presentations will be online after the show, so be sure to get your stat fix then.