Determining Automotive Demand: Demographic or Registration Data?

• Activity Number: 137
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 2, 2010 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and Marketing
• Author(s): James Wendelberger*+
• Companies: Urban Science Applications, Inc.
• Keywords: automotive ; demographic ; economic ; GainSmarts ; model comparison ; registrations

Abstract

One of the critical 4 P's in marketing a product is placement. The focus here has to do with determining in which channels one distributes and services a product. In other words this is retail network planning and management. Before performing this analysis, the issue to tackle is what data should one use? The data required in the automotive market for this type of analysis needs to be an indicator of consumer automotive potential. Two possible sources were considered, demographics (population, households, etc.) and vehicle registrations. Demographic and registration data from prior years are used to predict the current year of registration data. The contribution to r-squared of the demographic data and registration data is measured. The prior year registration data is shown to be a superior predictor than the demographic data.