Australians Love an SUV
Once the mainstay of outback adventurers and weekend off roaders, the humble SUV is fast becoming the vehicle of choice in 2014. The appeal of the SUV category has broadened to include both the fashion conscious and family market segments which is strongly supporting growth targets. July’s VFACTS data shows sales data to further this with 123,668 SUVs sold to private buyers year to date, an increase of 16,000. It seems this year’s adverts, pitching SUVs as appropriate to city slickers in narrow lanes and nightspots is in fact successfully broadening the category’s appeal. July VFACTS show SUV sales and thus popularity continue to rise with sales in the segment up by 12.7% when compared to July 2013. Year to date sales figures are also positive with an increase of 4.1%.
Taking a closer look at each segment we can see small SUV sales are up by 34.8% when compared to small SUV sales in July 2013. Medium SUV sales increased by 6.5% and large SUV sales were up 8.8%. Critics could say manufacturer plans to make the SUV segment more affordable in 2014 have certainly been successful. However, 2013 SUV sales leaders in the small SUV space (<$40k) have had to share the market with new comers. The Hyundai ix35, Mitsubishi ASX, Nissan Dualis, Subaru XV and Volkswagon Tiguan lead sales the small SUV segment in 2013. This July however all but the Mitsubishi ASX and Subaru XV have seen marked declines in their share of the total market.
In the large SUV (<70k) segment the Jeep Grand Cherokee is coming out on top in terms of SUV sales share year to date. With a 6% improvement on last years figures the Jeep Cherokee now leads the charge in the Large SUV sales under 70k, bringing this vehicles share to 15.8%. This is a big change for Jeep as the last time it ranked so strongly within the monthly top ten was in December 2005. The Toyota Prado is also still strong in 2014 and is tracking at 15.4% share year to date, a 1% improvement from last period. The Nissan pathfinder however has improved 3% year to date which is a strong improvement from the 696 vehicles sold in the first seven months of 2013.
With such growth in this market there is a great opportunity to forge strong relationships with these new clients. However, there is no hard and fast cheat sheet to best take advantage of these new vehicle sales for the long term.
Instead you should ask yourself the following questions:
Has your showroom adequately captured all of your new SUV customer demographic data?
Is the CRM geared from today to celebrate each milestone your customer has with their new SUV?
Is there a clean handover process from the showroom to aftersales and fixed operations?
Do you have all mobile numbers captured so service reminders can be sent for their large or small SUV?
Could finance product marketing be scheduled for their next purchase on the information provided?
