• by Karl Greenberg , April 2, 2008

J.D. Power & Associates scored a coup last month in the hiring of Finbarr O'Neill--the man who, as president and CEO of Hyundai North America in the late 1990s, was instrumental in saving the Korean brand from the scrap yard.

O'Neill then moved on to a brief tenure as co-chairman, president and CEO at Mitsubishi Motor Sales North America, and was most recently CEO and vice chairman of auto dealer information-systems firm Reynolds and Reynolds. At Power, he is SVP/ general manager of international operations.

In his new post, O'Neill will oversee the firm's expansion into Asia-Pacific, Europe and Canada. O'Neill, it should be noted, started life as a corporate lawyer. Some years back he recounted to this writer a life-changing experience he'd had at a starched-collar legal firm in New York--an experience that he suggested made him see that corporate law could lead to an existence out of "Bleak House." To paraphrase liberally: "I was walking down the hall at the firm and passed a colleague. He was just standing there, banging his head into the wall again and again."

At Hyundai, O'Neill did his share of that. Hyundai is now one of the top-selling marques in the U.S., but the situation in 2000 was critical: even though the automaker's build quality had improved, consumers didn't think so. To remedy the situation, O'Neill introduced the 10-year/100,000-mile warranty, a proxy for vehicle quality. Such tactics are now commonplace. He says that the business environment has changed, but consumers still look for the best-built machines.

"All manufacturers have improved quality significantly, but consumers are still evaluating brands based on quality, and there still is perception regarding certain brands that their quality isn't up to par." This is meat and potatoes for J.D. Power's business, particularly around its Power Information Network, which culls consumer sentiment and analysis of their recent purchases. "We are reflecting the voice of the customer back to the OEM," says O'Neill.

He says that is not a lot different than what he was doing at Reynolds & Reynolds, where "we were in the business of trying to provide dealers with tools based on extracting information, quantifying it and applying it."

J.D. Power & Associates is best-known for its retrospective work--studies like IQS (initial quality study) or APEAL (Automotive Performance, Execution and Layout Study ) that are based on crunching the numbers in surveys of consumer reaction to cars they have already purchased.

O'Neill says that library of data holds the key to the firm's evolution toward more predictive work. "We are looking to expand upstream and not just be retrospective--but also extracting from the data information that will be helpful initially, to better inform manufacturers' early choices on things like how to price and package a vehicle, and how to plan incentives--not as a corrective action, but prior to that. If you can move upstream and be helpful to OEM decision-making earlier in the development of their products, we can improve the value of our products."

He says global business is where J.D. Powers' opportunity lies. "There's a lot of growth potential in the auto industry, not just in China any more; there's growth in Brazil, Russia and India."