In just a few short years, some 60,000 auto-related discussion forums and Web logs have emerged on the Internet as gathering spots where vocal, influential owners and potential customers talk about auto companies and vehicles—24 hours a day, seven days a week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Moreover, key decision makers and stakeholders—competitors, government agencies, the media, attorneys, current and former employees, and suppliers—are increasingly listening and referring to these online discussion communities for real-time insights.<\/p>\n
Today, nearly 75% of consumers cite word-of-mouth recommendations as the most influential factor in their car-buying . In the space of a few short years, the Internet has evolved into a useful medium for particular kinds of commerce. After the dot-com hype of the 1990s, several car-buying Web sites emerged as some of the most popular of all Web destinations for consumers.<\/p>\n
In addition to these quasi-official sites for information and opinions about vehicles, a parallel universe of Internet communities also sprang up where consumers freely shared information and informal opinions about all phases of the automotive experience—new-car attributes and drawbacks, subjective accounts about ownership, comparisons of competing vehicles, anticipation about new models, safety issues, product recalls, service problems, launch glitches and hassles with dealers.<\/p>\n
These online communities, populated almost exclusively by consumers who love to talk about their cars, trucks and SUVs, have become an increasingly legitimate, albeit unstructured, source of car-related information in the eyes of all potential consumers.<\/p>\n
Quite inevitably, this vast new storehouse of highly believable, unsolicited, unstructured information has begun to exercise huge infl uence on consumers’ behavior.<\/p>\n
Left unmonitored and unchecked, these free-form and unstructured Internet discussions can both boost and harm automotive companies’ brand images, loyalty and satisfaction levels, product-quality perceptions, sales and profi ts.<\/p>\n
As this paper will explore, these influential consumers, and the consumers and stakeholders they infl uence, are directly affecting the bottom lines of automotive manufacturers and dealers.<\/p>\n
Of consumers who purchased a 2001 or 2002 vehicle, nearly 20% participated in online discussion groups before buying (Source: JD Power & Associates).<\/p>\n
Consumers continue to rely on car companies and the automotive media for updated product information, auto reviews and new-model information, but more and more of them are looking to the Internet to narrow their choices and evaluate their options.<\/p>\n
More info: [url=http:\/\/www.feedbackasp.com\/whitepaper]http:\/\/www.feedbackasp.com\/whitepaper[\/url]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-motor-industry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2928,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions\/2928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}