October 31st, 2022, Hoang Nguyen
The automotive sector has gone through a period of transformation in the last few years with online retailers becoming increasingly popular resulting in consumers altering their shopping preferences.
In YouGov’s latest Auto Report 2022, we examine a few of these changes and explore what’s driving consumers’ purchase behaviors around the world. Understanding public impression of brands and the sentiment of the conversations occurring around them is crucially important to gauging a brand’s positioning relative to its competitors - and developing a winning strategy.
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Using YouGov BrandIndex—which tracks consumers’ perceptions of brands on a daily basis—we see that the automotive companies generating the most Buzz in the UK are a mix of American, Japanese and German brands.
Ford topped the list over the last full year, generating the highest level of positive Buzz among all UK consumers. Buzz measures if consumers have heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, whether through advertising, news or word of mouth and, if they did, whether it was positive or negative.
The automaker announced last year that it would invest up to 230 million pounds to build electric car components in northern England, with the government contributing to the investment through the Automotive Transformation Fund.
Runner-up Toyota performed well in the Buzz ranking, followed closely by Mercedes-Benz, Audi and Tesla who are within decimal points of one another and round out the top five.
But there’s a shakeup in the rankings when viewing by specific age demographics. We can see that electric vehicle brand Tesla ranks as the number one brand in terms of Buzz among under 49’s. Among those 50 and over, Tesla drops out of the top 5 to the 19th position and Kia, Jaguar and Volvo enter the conversation.
Tesla’s prominent Buzz scores among younger demographics seem to mirror their higher levels of consideration for an electric vehicle: one in 10 UK adults aged 49 and under say they would consider purchasing an electric vehicle (10% vs. 6% of UK adults aged 50 and over).
Download YouGov’s new Auto Report 2022 to explore insights into 18 international markets, including:
- The rise of digital purchasing options
- Who is receptive to buying vehicles online
- Car purchase drivers
- The E-volution and the barriers facing the EV market
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