Update: Can You Rank The Affluency Of A Brand?

Can you rank the affluence of a brand? The marketing and advertising executives certainly say yes, with proper marketing you can draw a demographic into the showroom. But will they buy or even look?

There certainly is a lot of talk who is successful around here, and who draws the most affluent market share. But how do you measure the affluence factor? How about by measuring what actually is sold to the consumer? It would be easy if everyone released comprehensive statistics of what the typical C-Class or ES350 sold for, but these are closely held statistics. Not deemed fit for consumption by the general public.

But what we do know who sold what, and the general price range of the vehicle falls into. From this information we can extrapolate some of the facts and attempt piece together the larger puzzle.

The first task at hand is to obtain price range of the models from major site such as www.autos.yahoo.com or www.autos.msn.com and then extrapolate the median price. Then by querying the public sales charts we can extract the total sales in dollars for each of the models. Then we multiply the median price of the model by the sales figure we then get the total revenue dollars based that model. By adding the model sales together and dividing by the total sold of the manufacturer we get an average figure for the brand. Basically we get a theoretical average transaction price for the brand. The more expensive the average price, the more affluent it is. This is because people are willing to part with larger sums of money to own that brand due to quality, exclusivity, or even snob appeal. If the brand does not sell or market cars with high enough MSRP then either they market to a less affluent customer, or the consumer fails to see the value and buys elsewhere.

Lets give an example:

From the above example we can see that “Brand A” sells 34% of the total as entry models, but the core of it sales are based with the middle line at 51% and there is an impressive venture into the upscale market with almost 15% penetration. This is pretty typical amongst many manufacturers. We also find by adding the total sales dollars of all models and dividing by the total sales we find that the average consumer that buys “Brand A” spends $43,046 dollars. The higher the number, the more affluent the buyer it attracts.

So lets let the chips fall where they may with the 8 imported luxury brands Lexus, Acura, Infiniti, Mercedes Benz, BMW, Porsche, Jaguar and Audi. You knew this was going to happen didn’t you?

(update note: Jaguar and Porsche were added to the matrix at the request of readers)

So what does all tell us? From the above figures we can rank the top manufacturer for each category by using bold text.

You can draw whatever you want from the figures but it is interesting to note that the Europeans main sales strength is in the $40k to $70k marketplace, while the Japanese sales tend to congregate in the sub $40k demographic or the near luxury market.

Giving credit where credit is due though, the Lexus LS series is doing quite a credible job gaining traction in the over $70k range. But the 73% of Lexus sales are still entry vehicles under $40k. Both Acura and Infiniti also concentrate in near luxury but neither have any presence in the $70k market place.

Jaguar on the hand suprised most us by showing it's cache in the $70k+ market. It would be wise to not count Jaguar out just quite yet.

By looking at the figures we can all claim who are the leaders. But when it comes to parting with the hard earned cash at this point Porsche simply does the best job putting it in their pocket..