December 14th, 2023, Janice Fernandes
In the highly competitive automotive industry and with the continuing cost-of-living crisis, it is crucial for brands to give consumers value for their money.
In this piece we look at the three brands who are perceived by the general British public as offering the best value for money and examine how effective those brands are at guiding people through the key stages of the marketing funnel to convert them into customers.
Using data from YouGov BrandIndex — which monitors key measures of brand health daily — we look at the performance of these top three car brands in the UK over the course of the last half year to examine that consumer journey.
Ford
The American car brand continues to maintain a strong reputation for value for money. Ford is almost ubiquitously known in the country with 97.4% of all UK consumers aware of the car maker.
More than a quarter of all UK consumers (28%) say they would consider purchasing from Ford the next time they are in the market for a car.
Where Ford stands out most from the other brands we look at in this piece — Toyota and Kia — is on the last stage of the purchase funnel journey: Purchase Intent. Ford’s conversion rate from Consideration to Purchase Intent (41%) is 9 percentage points more than Toyota and 11 percentage points more than Kia, marking out its outstanding efficiency at this stage.
Toyota
Like Ford, Toyota demonstrates a high Awareness score, with 96.8% of UK consumers familiar with the brand.
When it comes to the Consideration stage, 22.7% of UK consumers say they would consider buying from Toyota the next time they are looking to buy a car. Toyota effectively converts almost a quarter of its aware consumers into potential customers.
Examining the Purchase Intent stage, Toyota displays a 7.2% score, indicating the likelihood of a consumer choosing to buy from the brand. This shows that the Japanese car maker converts just around a third (32%) of those considering the brand to the point of intending purchase.
Kia
Our third brand, Kia, has a high level of brand recognition in the UK, with 92.9% of consumers saying they are aware of the brand. That’s not bad for a brand that entered the UK market in 1991.
However, Kia’s Consideration score signifies a conversion rate of 18% from the Awareness stage - the lowest of our three selected brands.
The South Korean brand’s levels continue to drop in the final stage of the purchase funnel. The brand’s Purchase Intent score of 5.1% reveals a conversion rate of 30% from the Consideration stage to the Purchase Intent stage, making it the least efficient of our brands at turning Consideration into Intent.
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