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-   -   Gauging Brand popularity - Car manufacturer Alexa rankings (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/indian-car-scene/69277-gauging-brand-popularity-car-manufacturer-alexa-rankings.html)

Further to my previous thread on brand perceptions, what is the urban consumer's interest in a particular car brand? Of course, you can point me toward my own sales analysis threads and we'll have our answer. Right?

Nope, lets have some fun :). What we are discussing here is interest in a brand (not necessarily sales, that are obviously influenced by affordability). A unique way of gauging urban India's interest is via traffic / popularity stats of the websites of Indian car manufacturers. NOTE : The reason I use the term "Urban India" is because of the poor internet penetration levels in semi-urban / rural India. Of course, alexa rankings by themselves are debatable, but remember what I said....lets have some fun!

Alexa rankings in order of popularity (as of 12/11/2009). The brand websites that are most visited in India:




Source : Alexa

Some observations:

- Tata on top! Whoa, Manza + Nano effect?

- Honda on place no.2. Perhaps, only fueling the doubt that Honda remains a brand of high aspiration with the Indian middle class. To put their ranking in perspective, it is higher than the websites of all the car magazines in India!

- Maruti would actually be on the no.1 spot. However, the giant has individual microsites for its cars (e.g. marutisx4.com) compared to say, Tata, who has all cars listed on the parent site itself. Unfortunately, Alexa doesn't offer any way to club results for multiple websites (i.e. the ranking of marutiudyog.com + marutisx4.com + all other maruti websites).

- Clearly, there is substantial interest in the Chevrolet Cruze. An India ranking of 2,415 for a website on a single 10+ lakh car is no mean feat. The traffic to chevycruze.in is far more than even that of best sellers like the Swift and i10.

- Look at where Toyota is, compared to its chief Jap competitor. One reason could be the clientelle for its best selling product (Innova) which simply isn't internet-friendly!

- Fiat's good looking cars are attracting some attention. The real challenge for Fiat is to convert that interest into hard purchases. Even the Punto's dedicated website is ranked 12th overall!

- Mahindra Scorpio @ 5,271. Compare that to competitor Safari @ 15,851. Sure reflects in the sales figures too eh? (4:1 in favour of the Scorpio).

- BMW at rank 19! And just a notch below Skoda who sells substantially cheaper cars. 4 spots higher than Mercedes. Is BMW the new definition of luxury? Is "sporty" BMW attracting more city dwellers than "luxurious" Mercedes? Audi's website traffic is nowhere in contention here.

- The Alto may be India's best selling car by a mile, yet its not a car on which you would drool over on your computer screen. That, and the fact that a part of its semi-urban / rural customers may not have internet access / friendliness.

- The problem with Volkswagen, Nissan & Audi : No one is interested or aware of their brands (now you know why the VW ad blitzkrieg).

Interstingly no Ford listing in the list provided. Could also be due to the fact that there havent been any new major launches by Ford recently.

Wait, what about the Endeavour A/T etc?

This is certainly an interesting thread. Interest or curiousity means that there is brand recall which marketers hope will translate into some sales. Obviously companies with recent launches will record more hits.

Some management guru / student might do a study on co-relation between website popularity and sales.

Cheers,

Whats interesting is the chevycruze.in site is lower on the global rankings list than the chevrolet.co.in site. but the indian ranks are the opposite .. wonder how Alexa came up with that .. (found something to do this afternoon before leaving office!)

wonderful info and rightly said GTO. the explanationis also great but don't you feel the ranking and brand is very much low for scorpio from the tables above

Not really. Tata too has microsites (tatanano.com, indigomanza.com, safaridicor.com) for individual cars with a parent site in similar way to Maruti. The popularity here is right down to one car... NANO. We must not forget that it has been only few months since the launch of car and most of the booking procedures involved visit to the website. Tata Motors is also commercial vehicle manufacturer making its product portfolio much larger than that of Maruti and hence subject to a more varied and potentially larger traffic on website.

Good work, GTO. Its an interesting way to analyse brand perception. But other than Honda, I think the top results are biased towards recent launches. Aggregation of similar reports over a period of time may throw in a much more balanced view.

Ford India's website is a part of the global Ford portal (india.ford.com). Alexa can give us the ranking for ford.com, but not india.ford.com.

Not too surprising. I can't think of a single reason why any foreigners would be interested in an India-specific Cruze website.

Could have to do with Mahindra's large base of rural / semi-urban customers, where internet penetration is abysmally low?

You share a good point, Akhilesh.

Good and Interesting thread ,but what about our great HM.
I know that if we search for HM, there will be a warring message from google that this might affect your machine:uncontrol.
It good to Know that Scorpio has equal popularity of Swift in world raking.

tata on top because of the nano obviously.
with 'n' Number of people checking the website from time to time whether they have been allotted a nano.

Honestly, the way the brands are ranked is not correct and completely gives a negative image of all companies, look at the stats, I mean what do they reflect, Ranking of every individual website, as you can see the ranking is per website not per company, I mean if you have a closer look at that list you will find 10 websites of maruti in it, So the larger the number of websites the lower the rank will fall (individual model site compared to company main site),
I think you are getting what I am trying to say..

Finally, the company with more number of websites may reach more number of customers than a company with fewer websites..

Surprisingly the hottest (largest selling) cars are very low in hits, eg. Nano, Alto, Dzire. SX4 which doesnt sell much as more hits then these cars.

Maybe customers go to TATA websites for info and research before buying - rather than going to showroom. While maybe they go the maruti showrooms for info and research before buying rather than go to the maruti website. Maruti being no3 despite 3 times the total TATA sales implies a dramatically different way in which customers decide to buy a maruti or tata.

Ford might have ranked pretty low even if they did have an India website. It's one of the worst car websites I have ever been to. I know 'cos I just bought a Ford and spent some time on the site. Lots of dead links, washed out car photos, no quick way to find out of the features of each variant and NO PRICE INFO!. I personally find that Maruti and Hyundai have decent websites.