Yet another Index
(August 16, 2011) General Motors’s Cadillac brand and Toyota Motor Corporation’s namesake division and luxury Lexus line topped the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s annual ranking of automakers. The index is an economic indicator of the quality of economic output, as experienced by the users of that output.
ACSI is a predictor of consumer spending and economic growth at the macro level, and tracks about 235 individual companies. Individual and company ACSI scores are predictive of company return on investment, net cash flow, and stock returns.
Toyota was the only non-premium brand in the top five, tying Cadillac and Lexus with 87 on a scale of 100, followed by Ford Motor Co.’s Lincoln and Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz with 86. BMW was No. 11, receiving an 83, dropping three points to its lowest mark since an 80 in 1997.
The Toyota score is “a surprise,” said Claes Fornell, the Donald C Cook Professor of Business Administration at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan who created the index in 1994, in a phone interview with Bloomberg. “Toyota makes a fair amount of fairly low-priced cars. For them to be that well-received is impressive, especially when you have a company like BMW scoring lower.”
The index is based on interviews with about 70,000 customers annually concerning satisfaction with goods and services. The annual auto rankings, based on data from 5,000 surveys collected during the second quarter, were released today.
The industry as a whole had a one point improvement as compared to last year. The score of 83 is the second- highest mark in the 17 years of the survey. Chrysler Group LLC’s Chrysler brand was the lowest-rated nameplate in the survey at 76.
Source: Bloomberg
Bookmark/Search this post with:
Email this Editorial
