The firm says purchase intent for Toyota fell from 13.9% of Edmunds. com car shoppers to 9.7% during the height of the recall, but that purchase intent is now back to 11.8% and is climbing.
Edmunds says Honda gained the most purchase intent at Toyota's expense, increasing by 1.1%; Ford purchase intent rose .8%; Hyundai and Mazda purchase intent each rose .7 percentage points; Nissan purchase intent rose .4 percentage points; Volkswagen purchase intent rose .3 percentage points; and Chevrolet and Subaru purchase intent each rose 0.2 percentage points.
Said Edmunds.com analyst Ray Zhou in a statement: "We expect that Toyota will make a full recovery fairly quickly. And Toyota dealers may enjoy higher profit margins as they will have less inventory to offer because of the production stoppage while the company will likely boost demand through brand-building goodwill incentives."--Karl Greenberg
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It's a curious trend, to see purchase intent rebounding so quickly, since the bad news at Toyota has been prolonged over quite some time. What would be even more interesting would be to quantify the effect of competitors' ad creative showing next to keywords like "toyota recall." I tried it a second ago, and saw ads for Chevrolet, GMC, Buick, Honda, VW, Mazda, etc. But just a few days ago, the space was blank. This is right in line with what we've advocated in Laurie Sullivan's article from yesterday, "How To Capitalize On Competitors' Failures In Search."
For our next trick, marketers will continue to refine ways to tie paid search performance to purchase intent...