The Car Brand People Are Most Likely to Buy Again

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 19, 8:30AM EDT

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Customer retention is a key to almost every product or service. People who repeat as customers require almost no replacement costs. When a business loses a current customer, replacing that person can involve heavy marketing costs, both in terms of advertising and human sale efforts. For something like a car, which can cost $30,000 or much more, the replacement price can move into thousands of dollars.

Gold standard car research firm J.D. Power conducts a study it calls its U.S. Automotive Brand Loyalty Study. The latest version is for 2020. The study is in its second year. Its simple measure is whether people who own a car brand will buy the same brand when they trade it in. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased brand loyalty.

Tyson Jominy, vice president of data and analytics at J.D. Power, commented:

Automakers are really focused on customer retention, as evidenced by the payment plans and incentives they’ve offered since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. Many have gone above and beyond to offer customers financial assistance during a period of economic uncertainty, which does a lot to bolster consumer confidence in their chosen brand and repurchase it in the future.

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The measure is called the loyalty rate.

Among luxury brands, Lexus, the luxury brand of Toyota, ranks in first place for the second year with a loyalty rate of 48.0%. Lexus has received strong grades for quality for many years from research firms and the car media.

Among mass market cars, Subaru is in first place at startlingly high 60.5%, followed closely by Toyota at 60.3%. Subaru is a somewhat niche brand among Japanese manufacturers, which include Toyota, Nissan and Honda. Subaru is known for small, fuel-efficient four-wheel-drive cars. Like all manufacturers, it has added a line of sport utility vehicles and crossovers to cater to the recent American preference for these kinds of vehicles. The brand has received strong reviews for quality and its reasonable prices models.

Click here to see which car brand people are most likely to dump.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.