Who's Buying, Who's Not and Why; Latest Automotive Study from Acxiom Identifies Consumers with Highest Propensity to Buy

LITTLE ROCK, Ark.--Spiraling fuel costs, an unrelenting credit squeeze and a dramatic decrease in consumer spending conspired to hand the automotive industry one of its worst years on record in 2008. Going into a new year, however, automakers will have additional marketing insight to help reverse their course. Today, Acxiom® Corporation announces its release of the latest Automotive Consumer Dynamics study: “Who’s Buying, Who’s Not and Why.”

Going beyond broad-based surveys to reveal consumer-centric insights across more than 130 million U.S. households, the study uncovers demographic and life stage portraits, shopping behaviors, attitudes, intentions and propensities toward vehicle purchase and ownership for 2009.

“As the new year begins for the automotive industry, marketers are under tremendous pressure to execute strategy and tactics with smaller budgets,” said Tim Longnecker, automotive industry executive for Acxiom Corporation. “To survive in this challenging economic time, automotive marketers will need additional “horsepower” to understand who and where the “buy now” consumers are and how best to capture their attention and business.”

Beginning with a retrospective view of changing consumer attitudes and behaviors in 2008, key findings in the current ACD study reveal:

• Necessity has become the number one purchasing motivator across all consumer segments – consumers in a “buy now” mindset list needing better gas mileage or having high mileage on their current vehicle as their highest purchase motivator.
• “Buy Now” consumers are found in five automotive consumer groups, Upper Rung City, Upper Rung Suburban, The Single Life, Working for a Living and Unattached Urbans show the highest activity for planning to buy/lease within the next six months.

• Consumer Affinities and Propensities Remain Largely Unchanged – Despite the challenging economy, consumers, for the most part, remain committed to the brands and segments to which they were previously attracted. Changes in consumer actions reflect aspects of vehicle buying and leasing primarily out of their control (such as a raise in a lender’s baseline qualifying credit score or an OEM’s decision to cut back or eliminate their lease offerings).

“The findings revealed in this study give marketers a taste of the capabilities and impact Acxiom brings to create opportunity in an extremely tough environment,” said Longnecker. “Leveraging these data-driven insights across channels gives automotive marketers a unique advantage to capture and retain U.S. vehicle consumers while driving more effective use of marketing resources.”

Automotive Consumer Dynamics tracks more than 1,000 defining elements and their influence on all major brands and nameplates. It uses Acxiom’s dynamic and proprietary repository of consumer information, InfoBase-X®, and its household-level segmentation suite, PersonicX® Classic.

For a copy of Acxiom’s most recent Automotive Consumer Dynamics study, please link to http://www.acxiom.com/automotive_consumer_dynamics_study

About Acxiom

A global leader in interactive marketing services, Acxiom connects clients with their customers through deep consumer insight, powering effective and profitable marketing initiatives and business decisions. Our consultative approach spans multiple industries and incorporates decades of experience in consumer data and analytics, information technology, data integration and consulting solutions for effective marketing across digital, Internet, email, mobile and direct mail channels. Founded in 1969, Acxiom is headquartered in Little Rock, Ark., and serves clients around the world from locations in the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific. For more information about Acxiom, visit www.acxiom.com.

About Acxiom Automotive

Acxiom empowers automotive manufacturers and marketers to become more consumer-centric and faster-to-market. Using a unique combination of data, analytics, optimization and integration, Acxiom’s next generation of digital marketing services enables consistent, relevant life-cycle communications that span consumer touchpoints. From direct mail to social networks, top automakers and dealers rely on Acxiom to provide effective, one-on-one marketing insights and solutions to drive higher sales and improved return on their marketing investments.