By : Alexander Mulya
(Chief Executive MarkPlus Institute of Marketing)


Marketeers March 2010

Before designing any strategy, we must first understand how people perceive our Brand. For its most recent Dinner Seminar, MarkPlus Insight, MarkPlus, Inc.’s research division has done a survey that involves 111 executive respondents in the Jakarta, Bandung and Surabaya area. 

The results? Studies of associations to brands have shown that the strongest perception (close to 18%) is "The price is cheap". (See Table 1)



Main associations tend to lean heavy with the relations of why consumers buy a specific brand. In this case, inexpensive price is most likely to be the reason why consumers decide to buy the Daihatsu brand. The second strongest association is the commercial car (around 9%) that has become a classification of a product. To have a specific perception of being in a certain class has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages include brand perceptions as a specialist in its class – or a reference brand that needs to be considered if you want to decide on a commercial car. The disadvantage of it is if the brand is going to be used to penetrate a different class. In this case, for an example, with Daihatsu that has already reached 70% of its sales in the "Passenger" class, the existence of the perception of a commercial car will be limiting. Not forgetting the continuous association that the commercial car lacks "lifestyle" and "comfort" as well as "low class."

The third strongest association is its affordable price (close to 8%), which means that if it is combined with the first strongest association, inexpensive price, the total perception that the price is economical reaches 25%. In addition, if we consider the fourth strongest association, cheap spare parts, (close to 6%), the total of the perception that the car is reasonably priced will reach 31%.

The perception of "after sales fall" is a bit of a concern, but fortunately it is not too high in percentage (around 6%). However, it is this misperception that is unfortunate, considering that Daihatsu’ after sales price pars with other Japanese cars in general (including Avanza).

There is a strong association with "gasoline efficiency" (close to 6%), but it is unfortunate that this 6% is still considered low. Although efficiency is a strong value used by Daihatsu’s salesmen, this perception has not penetrated consumers’ minds quite well. Other associations that hover around 4% are also not very impressive, including "Engine is not so good", "Design is not so good", "Design is simple", and "Difficulty in finding spare parts."

For this reason, there needs to be a significant effort to improve Daihatsu’s image. This is on of Daihatsu’s main challenge. This image improvement can be done through improving its service infrastructure, how salesmen offer products as well as advertising methods that should now be shifting from merely affordable price/promo/credit to brand building.

To evaluate a product’s successful level in terms of competition, we need to compare the perceptions of Daihatsu’s brand performance with other automotive brands. This performance shows the brands that are considered to have quality. However, quality is relative to what is more important to a consumer when deciding on a certain brand. For an example, from MarkPlus’ research, it is found that the Toyota brand is the number one in the "after sales price" aspect. Honda, on the other hand, is said to be leading in the other aspects. In general, Honda can be said to be the strongest brand. What about Daihatsu?

A full version of this article in Bahasa Indonesia can be read in our March 2010 edition of Marketeers.